Patent ID: 6906478

Claim:
A method of producing synchrotron radiation comprising the steps of accelerating and compressing an electron beam from an electron source by means of a pre-accelerator, further accelerating the electron beam in a main accelerator to produce synchrotron radiation on a recirculation orbit, decelerating the electron beam in the main accelerator to recover its energy and discarding it into a beam dump, said pre-accelerator being an energy-recovery pre-accelerator and posited before the main accelerator on said recirculation orbit, and a resonance frequency in an accelerating cavity in the pre-accelerator is slightly offset from a input radio-frequency wave frequency, whereby an energy of the accelerated electron beam is recovered in the pre-accelerator and a radio-frequency required by the pre-accelerator is brought sufficiently close to zero that a radio-frequency power to be supplied externally is reduced.