Development of novel low-voltage free-electron lasers in the 5–500GHz region

The electromagnetic spectrum from 50Hz to 5000Hz is important for many industrial, commercial, and scientific applications. In particular for the 100–500GHz region, free electron lasers (FELs) are usually the only viable radiation sources with sizeable output power and as such are an attractive enabling technology for many applications. One major issue for widespread application of free electron lasers is to reduce their cost and size. This is particularly challenging because of the expensive electron accelerator system they employ. To make it significantly more attractive economically for many important applications, the electron energy has to be reduced to below 300keV. In this thesis two novel electron-energy-reduction techniques are investigated for FEL systems operated in the spectrum from 50Hz to 5000Hz with the development of a suite of suitable FEL codes. [Continues.]