Towards Plasma-Driven Free-Electron Lasers

Plasma-based accelerators are promising candidates to drive next-generation compact freeelectron lasers (FEL) with unique X-ray properties. The correct modelling of the physics in the laser-plasma accelerator and of the FEL amplification from plasma-generated electron bunches thereby forms the basis for any application driven by these beams. Both problems are, however, extremely challenging. They heavily rely on computer simulations and, in fact, act as science drivers for the development of the latest generation of high-performance, highly parallel and efficient simulation codes. Here, we present our work towards a plasma-driven FEL, based on the particle-in-cell (PIC) codes VSIM and WARP, and the non-averaging 3D FEL code PUFFIN.