Merger designs for ERLs

Energy recovery linacs (ERLs) are potential candidates for the high power and high brightness electron beams sources. The main advantages of ERL are that electron beam is generated at relatively low energy, injected and accelerated to the operational energy in a linac, and after the use is decelerated in the same linac down to injection energy, and, finally, dumped. A merging system, i.e. a system merging together high energy and low energy beams, is an intrinsic part of any ERL loop. One of the challenges for generating high charge, high brightness electron beams in an ERL is development of a merging system. In this paper, we discuss merger system currently employed or planned to use for ERL as discuss their advantages and shortcomings. We also discuss analytical approach showing a way towards an optimal merger.