The volume contains the proceedings of the 7th Course on Physics and
Technology of Free Electron Lasers of the International School of
Quantum Electronics, which was held in Erice (Italy) from 17 to 29
August 1980, under the auspices of the "Ettore Majorana" Centre for
Scientific Culture. The level of this Course was much closer to a
workshop than to a school, and "Advances in Free Electron Lasers" might
have been an appropriate title. Many of the world's leading scientists
in the field (among them, the inventor of FEL, J. M. J. Madey) were
brought together to review the accomplishments of FEL experiments, as
well various trends in FEL theory. In editing this material we did not
modify the original manu- scripts except to assist in uniformity of
style. The papers. are presented without reference to the chronology of
the Course but in the following topical arrangement: A. "Fundamentals of
free electron lasers," a group of tutorial papers; B. "Free electron
lasers operating in the Compton regime," where theories and experiments
of FELs based on Compton scattering are reviewed; C. "Free electron
lasers operating in the Raman regime," a dis- cussion of FELs based on
Raman scattering; D. "Optical klystrons," where the possibility of this
class of FEL is discussed from a theoretical viewpoint; E.