Despite tremendous progress in X-ray free-electron laser (FEL) science over the last decade, future applications still demand fully coherent, stable X-rays that have not been demonstrated in existing X-ray FEL facilities. In this talk, we describe an active Q-switched X-ray regenerative amplifier FEL (XRAFEL) to produce fully coherent, high-brightness, hard X-rays. By using simple electron beam phase space manipulation, we show this scheme is very flexible in controlling the X-ray cavity quality factor Q and hence the output radiation. We report both theoretical and numerical studies on this scheme with a wide range of accelerator, X-ray cavity, and undulator parameters. We also report an experimental demonstration of a large-scale, low-loss, stable Bragg cavity.
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