Prat, E. Reiche, S. TUP019 laser FEL electron undulator radiation 2015 2015-12 SwissFEL is an FEL facility presently under construction at the Paul Scherrer institute that will serve two beamlines: Aramis, a hard X-ray beamline which is in construction phase and will provide FEL radiation in 2017 with a wavelength between 0.1 and 0.7 nm; and Athos, a soft X-ray beamline which is in design phase and it is expected to offer FEL light in 2021 for radiation wavelengths between 0.7 and 7 nm. A passive synchronization of the FEL signal to a laser source is fundamental for key experiments at Athos, such as the time-resolved resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) experiments. In this paper we explore different options to achieve this time synchronization by means of energy modulating the electron beam with an external laser.