Construction complete on building to house machines at XFEL facility
29 May 2009 (Volume 4 Issue 5)
Celebrating completion of the facility.
Construction of a building to house linear accelerators, undulators and other equipment for use in the X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) facility was completed in March, 2009, at the SPring-8 campus of the RIKEN Harima Institute.
The building has a long narrow structure measuring 650m in length, and was constructed under a unique set of challenging constraints: flooring is aligned precisely to within several micrometers, and walls encasing the accelerator are a full two meters thick.
Producing light with a shortness of pulse and wavelength never before explored, the XFEL facility will illuminate worlds less than a tenth of a nanometer (one billionth of a meter) in size, on a time scale of only a femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second). XFEL projects are being developed not only in Japan, but also in the U.S. and in Europe.
With completion of the building, installation of equipment such as accelerators and undulators, as well as configuration of temperature control systems, can now begin. Construction on buildings to be used for future experiments will also get under way.
Lasing of the XFEL is set to commence by 2010. Starting from 2011, XFEL will serve as a common-use facility for researchers from Japan and from overseas, enabling them to carry out a wide range of new cutting-edge experiments.
Preliminary experiments are already underway at a prototype XFEL (an EUV laser source with 1/32th the electron energy of the actual facility) for use in research following completion of the actual XFEL facility.
