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. 2019 Jul 17;9:10391. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-45024-2

Figure 1.

Figure 1

Microbunching instability in a relativistic electron bunch. (a) Illustration: at accelerator locations where curved trajectories are present, each electron interacts with the coherent synchrotron radiation emitted by the others. (b,c) Numerical simulation: resulting spontaneous appearance of a pattern in phase space, which evolves in a complex way (computation using KARA storage ring parameters, see Method Section, and Supplementary Video 1). (c) Corresponding longitudinal density profile. Note that the fast modulation in (c) – thought apparently small – is responsible for a particularly intense emission of coherent synchrotron radiation (typically 103–105 times the normal synchrotron radiation) ranging from the millimeter-wave to THz domains.