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Challenges and opportunities for the next decade of XFELs

Nature Reviews Physics volume 2, pages 340–341 (2020)Cite this article

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The first decade of X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) has led to technological advances and scientific discoveries, but has also highlighted several facility-level challenges. Chi-Chang Kao, Director of SLAC, discusses the lessons to be learned from the first 10 years of operation and shares his thoughts on how facilities can overcome challenges facing XFEL development.

The development of X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) is a fascinating story of scientific ingenuity. It started from the dream of generating 1 Å coherent emission from a large number of electrons and progressed over 50 years with advances in theoretical concepts and experimental demonstrations: from radiation generated from relativistic electrons propagating through an undulator magnet, to reaching shorter wavelengths using micro-bunching within an electron bunch and, eventually, to the fully self-consistent theory that led to the high-gain theory of XFELs1. The culmination of these advances was the US Department of Energy’s decision to construct the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The first hard XFEL, LCLS, achieved successful lasing in 2009, with an initial wavelength range of 1.5–15 Å. From there, progress has been truly breathtaking.

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References

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks XFEL facility directors around the world for sharing their experiences and thinking over the years and M. Dunne and J. Hastings for reading the article and the discussions on this topic. SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the USA. LCLS is a DOE Office of Science user facility.

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  1. SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA, USA

    Chi-Chang Kao

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  1. Chi-Chang Kao
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Correspondence to Chi-Chang Kao.

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Kao, CC. Challenges and opportunities for the next decade of XFELs. Nat Rev Phys 2, 340–341 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-020-0196-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-020-0196-2

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