R&D Toward an Energy Recovery Linac at Synchrotron Light Source

Synchrotron radiation (SR) sources have produced extraordinary advances in fields such as biology, chemistry, materials science, physics, and even in art and history. Storage-ring sources are continually being improved but have inherent limitations from the equilibrium emittances arising from many passes of the electron bunch around the ring. As we described in an earlier SRN article [1], an Energy Recovery Linac (ERL) source of X-rays can overcome many of these limitations to produce X-rays of high coherence and short pulse length, which can be focused down to a 1–10 nm round beam size.