Compression of XUV FEL pulses in the few-femtosecond regime

This work presents the design of a grating compressor for XUV FEL pulses able to compress chirped pulses from some hundreds to some tens of femtoseconds. The instrument adopts the conical diffraction mounts of gratings to reach high efficiency. We discuss the general design of the compressor and present an example of application to FEL emission at 13.5 nm. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.