SOLEIL ("Sun" in French) is a synchrotron facility near Paris, France. It performed its first acceleration of electrons on May 14, 2006. The name SOLEIL is a backronym for Source optimisée de lumière d’énergie intermédiaire du LURE (LURE optimised intermediary energy light source), LURE meaning Laboratoire pour l'utilisation du rayonnement électromagnétique.
The facility is run by a civil corporation held by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), two French national research agencies. It is located in Saint-Aubin in the Essonne département, a south-western suburb of Paris, near Gif-sur-Yvette and Saclay, which host other facilities for nuclear and particle physics.[ citation needed ]
The facility is an associate member of the University of Paris-Saclay.[ citation needed ]
SOLEIL also hosts IPANEMA, the European research platform on ancient materials (archaeology, palaeontology, past environments and cultural heritage), a joint CNRS / French Ministry of Culture and Communication research unit.[ citation needed ]
SOLEIL covers fundamental research needs in physics, chemistry, material sciences, life sciences (notably in the crystallography of biological macromolecules), earth sciences, and atmospheric sciences. It offers the use of a wide range of spectroscopic methods from infrared to X-rays, and structural methods such as X-ray diffraction and scattering. [1]
SOLEIL contains electrons travelling with an energy of 2.75 GeV around a 354 m circumference. It takes the electrons 1.2 μs to travel around this ring at almost the speed of light; 847,000 times per second. [2]
According to Google Scholar, in 2024 this is the top 10 of most cited scientists of Synchrotron Soleil: [3]
Citations: 23,755 Research Areas: X-ray physics, synchrotron radiation, XFEL, chemical physics, ultrafast X-ray
Citations: 15,273 Research Areas: Not specified
Citations: 12,628 Research Areas: Condensed matter physics, low-dimensional systems
Citations: 11,773 Research Areas: X-ray imaging, microtomography, X-ray microscopy, X-ray phase contrast imaging
Citations: 10,754 Research Areas: Chirality, circular dichroism, molecular photoionization, VUV spectroscopy, polarimetry
Citations: 8,535 Research Areas: Physical chemistry, Material sciences, materials for energy and hydrogen
Citations: 8,187 Research Areas: Physics
Citations: 7,977 Research Areas: Physics
Citations: 7,775 Research Areas: Band structure, materials science, topological insulators, graphene, superconductors
Citations: 7,706 Research Areas: Structural virology, nucleic acid-protein interaction, crystallography, tomography, synchrotron
DESY, short for Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, is a national research centre for fundamental science located in Hamburg and Zeuthen near Berlin in Germany. It operates particle accelerators used to investigate the structure, dynamics and function of matter, and conducts a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary scientific research in four main areas: particle and high energy physics; photon science; astroparticle physics; and the development, construction and operation of particle accelerators. Its name refers to its first project, an electron synchrotron. DESY is publicly financed by the Federal Republic of Germany and the Federal States of Hamburg and Brandenburg and is a member of the Helmholtz Association.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a federally funded research and development center in Menlo Park, California, United States. Founded in 1962, the laboratory is now sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and administrated by Stanford University. It is the site of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a 3.2 kilometer (2-mile) linear accelerator constructed in 1966 that could accelerate electrons to energies of 50 GeV.
A synchrotron light source is a source of electromagnetic radiation (EM) usually produced by a storage ring, for scientific and technical purposes. First observed in synchrotrons, synchrotron light is now produced by storage rings and other specialized particle accelerators, typically accelerating electrons. Once the high-energy electron beam has been generated, it is directed into auxiliary components such as bending magnets and insertion devices in storage rings and free electron lasers. These supply the strong magnetic fields perpendicular to the beam that are needed to stimulate the high energy electrons to emit photons.
Diamond Light Source is the UK's national synchrotron light source science facility located at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.
A synchrotron is a particular type of cyclic particle accelerator, descended from the cyclotron, in which the accelerating particle beam travels around a fixed closed-loop path. The magnetic field which bends the particle beam into its closed path increases with time during the accelerating process, being synchronized to the increasing kinetic energy of the particles.
The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) is a joint research facility situated in Grenoble, France, supported by 22 countries.
The Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based ScienceS and Education (CLASSE) is a particle accelerator facility located in Wilson Laboratory on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York. CLASSE was formed by merging the Cornell High-Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) and the Laboratory for Elementary-Particle Physics (LEPP) in July 2006. Nigel Lockyer is the Director of CLASSE in spring of 2023.
High-energy X-rays or HEX-rays are very hard X-rays, with typical energies of 80–1000 keV (1 MeV), about one order of magnitude higher than conventional X-rays used for X-ray crystallography. They are produced at modern synchrotron radiation sources such as the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source, SPring-8, and the beamlines ID15 and BM18 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF). The main benefit is the deep penetration into matter which makes them a probe for thick samples in physics and materials science and permits an in-air sample environment and operation. Scattering angles are small and diffraction directed forward allows for simple detector setups.
The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a research facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. One of the world's brightest sources of ultraviolet and soft x-ray light, the ALS is the first "third-generation" synchrotron light source in its energy range, providing multiple extremely bright sources of intense and coherent short-wavelength light for use in scientific experiments by researchers from around the world. It is funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and operated by the University of California. The current director is Dimitri Argyriou.
The Australian Synchrotron is a 3 GeV national synchrotron radiation facility located in Clayton, in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria. The facility opened in 2007, and is operated by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation.
The Swiss Light Source (SLS) is a synchrotron located at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland for producing electromagnetic radiation of high brightness. Planning started in 1991, the project was approved in 1997, and first light from the storage ring was seen at December 15, 2000. The experimental program started in June 2001 and it is used for research in materials science, biology and chemistry.
The Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS) at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, England was the first second-generation synchrotron radiation source to produce X-rays. The research facility provided synchrotron radiation to a large number of experimental stations and had an operating cost of approximately £20 million per annum.
The Cornell Electron Storage Ring is a particle accelerator operated by Cornell University and located 40 feet beneath a football field on their Ithaca campus. The accelerator has contributed to fundamental research in high energy physics and accelerator physics, as well as solid state physics, biology, art history and other fields through its use as a synchrotron light source. For many years, CESR held the world luminosity record for electron-positron collisions.
The National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York is a national user research facility funded primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science. NSLS-II is a synchrotron light source, designed to produce X-rays 10,000 times brighter than BNL's original light source, the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS). NSLS-II supports research in energy security, advanced materials synthesis and manufacturing, environment, and human health.
The Laboratory of Solid State Physics (LPS) is a research institute of the Paris-Saclay University, associated to the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) as a joint research unit. It is located in Orsay, France, about 25 km southwest of Paris.
Paris-Saclay University is a combined technological research institute and public research university in Orsay, France. Paris-Saclay was established in 2019 after the merger of four technical grandes écoles, as well as several technological institutes, engineering schools, and research facilities; giving it fifteen constituent colleges with over 48,000 students combined.
SOLARIS is a synchrotron light source in the city of Kraków in Poland. It is the only one facility of its kind in Central-Eastern Europe. Built in 2015, under the auspices of the Jagiellonian University, it is located on the Campus of the 600th Anniversary of the Jagiellonian University Revival, in the southern part of the city. It is the central facility of the National Synchrotron Radiation Centre SOLARIS.
The Polytechnic Institute of Paris is a public technological university located in Palaiseau, France. It consists of six engineering grandes écoles: École polytechnique, ENSTA Paris, ENSAE Paris, École des ponts ParisTech, Télécom Paris and Télécom SudParis.
Maria C. Asensio is a Spanish-Argentinian physical chemist, academic, researcher, and author. She is a Full Research Professor at the Materials Science Institute of Madrid (ICMM) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Chair of the CSIC Research Associated Unit-MATINÉE created between the ICMM and the Institute of Materials Science (ICMUV) of the Valencia University.
Janos Hajdu is a Swedish/Hungarian scientist, who has made contributions to biochemistry, biophysics, and the science of X-ray free-electron lasers. He is a professor of molecular biophysics at Uppsala University and a leading scientist at the European Extreme Light Infrastructure ERIC in Prague.