Advanced Light Source

Experiments at the ALS are performed at nearly 40 beamlines that can operate simultaneously over 5,000 hours per year, resulting in nearly 1,000 scientific publications annually in a wide variety of fields.

Electron bunches traveling near the speed of light are forced into a nearly circular path by magnets in the ALS storage ring.

When the ALS was first proposed in the early 1980s by former LBNL director David Shirley, skeptics doubted the use of a synchrotron optimized for soft x-rays and ultraviolet light.

Recent accelerator physics breakthroughs now enable the production of highly focused beams of soft x-ray light that are at least 100 times brighter than those of the existing ALS.

The new ring will use powerful, compact magnets arranged in a dense, circular array called a multibend achromat (MBA) lattice.

In combination with other improvements to the accelerator complex, the upgraded machine will produce bright, steady beams of high-energy light to probe matter with unprecedented detail.

The Advanced Light Source and surrounding buildings at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Inside the storage ring at the Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Large magnets bend, steer, and focus the electron beam as it circles the ring 1.4 million times per second.
View of the storage ring from the ALS overlook
Comparison of the beam profiles of ALS (A) and ALS-U (B). The highly focused beams of ALS-U will enable new scientific advances.