The Photon Factory (PF) is a synchrotron located at KEK, in Tsukuba, Japan, about fifty kilometres from Tokyo.
[1] The Photon Factory turned on its synchrotron for the first time in 1982, becoming the first light source accelerator in Japan to produce x-rays.
[1] In 1997, it joined the Institute of Materials Structure Science (IMSS), a Japanese-run international particle physics organization based at KEK.
[1] Its macromolecular crystallography beam is used substantially for Japan's structural genomics project.
[5] More recently, the Photon Factory has partnered with the Saha Institute and Jawaharlal Nehru Centre in India to create the Indian Beam, which is open to Indian particle and nuclear physicists to use for experiments in power diffraction, scattering, and reflectivity.