Polish Free Electron Laser; short technical description

The Polish Free Electron Laser, PolFEL(1) was proposed more than decade ago and at that time was accepted for the Polish Roadmap for Research Infrastructures. The facility was proposed to be built in two stages, at first, with fewer accelerating sections and lower beam energy and the second one, with more accelerating sections, delivering 600 MeV electrons to VUV undulator, generating in the Self Amplified Spontaneous Emission process coherent radiation at wavelength ranged down to 27 nm and 9 nm in the first and third harmonic mode, respectively. Over past decade new experimental methods have been proposed and developed, delivering interesting results obtained with relatively low energy coherent and non-coherent photon beams, for example with IR-UV and THz radiation. In this contribution, subsystems of an updated version of the first stage PolFEL facility will be discussed. The project has recently received funds from the Smart Growth Operational Programme, Measure 4.2: Development of modern research infrastructure of the science sector, and is currently in a preparation phase of the construction, which will begin in 2019.