Lasing of a cavity-based X-ray source
- Patrick Rauer
- Immo Bahns
- Bertram Friedrich
- Sara Casalbuoni
- Massimiliano Di Felice
- Martin Dommach
- Idoia Freijo Martin
- Wolfgang Freund
- Jan Grünert
- Marc Guetg
- Ivars Karpics
- Suren Karabekyan
- Andreas Koch
- Naresh Kujala
- Daniele La Civita
- Jia Liu
- Theophilos Maltezopoulos
- Mikako Makita
- Frank Mayet
- Lukas Müller
- Benoit Rio
- Liubov Samoylova
- Silja Schmidtchen
- Matthias Scholz
- Alessandro Silenzi
- Vivienne Strauch
- Daniel Thoden
- Torsten Wohlenberg
- Maurizio Vannoni
- Fan Yang
- Winfried Decking
- Joerg Rossbach
- Harald Sinn
2026-01-28
The invention of the laser transformed optics by providing intense, coherent light in the visible region, but extending this concept to X-rays has been hindered by a lack of suitable gain media and mirrors. Current hard X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) facilities 1–5 overcome this by amplifying shot noise from a high-peak-current electron bunch via self-amplified spontaneous emission 6 in a single pass through long undulators, delivering very high brightness but with a noisy, multi-spiked temporal and spectral profile. Cavity-based XFELs (CBXFELs) 7–9 were proposed to close this gap by recirculating spectrally filtered X-ray pulses in a Bragg-reflecting cavity synchronized to a high-repetition-rate electron beam. Here we show lasing with multi-pass gain at 6.952 keV in a 132.8-m round-trip diamond-based Bragg cavity 10 at the European XFEL, matched to the 2.23-MHz bunch spacing of the superconducting accelerator 5 . Under stringent length and angular stability requirements, a ring-up in the cavity across successive bunches was observed, producing spectrally pure, microjoule-level pulses. This establishes the feasibility of CBXFELs in an accelerator environment and validates diamond Bragg optics for X-ray resonators. The demonstrated spectral purity opens a path to next-generation X-ray science, which demands highly coherent, stable sources.