Robustness of a plasma acceleration based Free Electron Laser

Abstract: Laser Plasma Accelerators (LPA) can sustain GeV/m accelerating fields offering outstanding new possibilities for compact applications. Despite the impressive recent developments, the LPA beam quality is still significantly lower than in the conventional radio-frequency accelerators, which is an issue in the cases of demanding applications such as Free Electron Lasers (FELs). If the electron beam duration is below few tens of femtosecond keeping pC charges, the mrad level divergence and few percent energy spread are particularly limiting. Several concepts of transfer line were proposed to mitigate those intrinsic properties targetting undulator radiation applications. We study here the robustness of the chromatic matching strategy for FEL amplification at 200~nm in a dedicated transport line, and analyze its sensitivity to several parameters. We consider not only the possible LPA source jitters, but also various realistic defaults of the equipment such as magnetic elements misalignements or focussing strength errors, unperfect undulator fields, etc...