Experimental demonstration of a single-spike hard-X-ray free-electron laser starting from noise

In this letter, we report the experimental demonstration of single-spike hard-X-ray free-electron laser pulses starting from noise with multi-eV bandwidth. This is accomplished by shaping a low-charge electron beam with a slotted emittance spoiler and by adjusting the transport optics to optimize the beam-shaping accuracy. Based on elementary free-electron laser scaling laws, we estimate the pulse duration to be less than 1 fs full-width at half-maximum.

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