  Energy recovering an electron beam after it has participated in a
free-electron laser (FEL) interaction can be quite challenging because of the
substantial FEL-induced energy spread and the energy anti-damping that occurs
during deceleration. In the Jefferson Lab infrared FEL driver-accelerator, such
an energy recovery scheme was implemented by properly matching the longitudinal
phase space throughout the recirculation transport by employing the so-called
energy compression scheme. In the present paper,after presenting a
single-particle dynamics approach of the method used to energy-recover the
electron beam, we report on experimental validation of the method obtained by
measurements of the so-called "compression efficiency" and "momentum
compaction" lattice transfer maps at different locations in the recirculation
transport line. We also compare these measurements with numerical tracking
simulations.
