Marking the beginning of the LCLS-II era, the first phase of the major upgrade comes online.
Menlo Park, Calif. — Just over a decade ago in April 2009, the world’s first hard X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) produced its first light at the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) generated X-ray pulses a billion times brighter than anything that had come before. Since then, its performance has enabled fundamental new insights in a number of scientific fields, from creating “molecular movies” of chemistry in action to studying the structure and motion of proteins for new generations of pharmaceuticals and replicating the processes that create “diamond rain” within giant planets in our solar system.
The next major step in this field was set in motion in 2013, launching the LCLS-II upgrade project to increase the X-ray laser’s power by thousands of times, producing a million pulses per second compared to 120 per second today. This upgrade is due to be completed within the next two years.
Today the first phase of the upgrade came into operation, producing an X-ray beam for the first time using one critical element of the newly installed equipment.
Read more on the SLAC website
Image: Over the past 18 months, the original LCLS undulator system was removed and replaced with two totally new systems that offer dramatic new capabilities .
Credit: (Andy Freeberg/Alberto Gamazo/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)