Sources

On Tuesday, October 15th, the Jean-Louis Laclare Award* of the Société Française de Physique (SFP) was presented to Alexis Gamelin, a physicist in the Accelerator Physics Group at SOLEIL, during the "Rencontres Accélérateurs" held at IJCLab on the Orsay Faculty campus (Université Paris-Saclay). With this prize, the jury has rewarded Alexis Gamelin's ability to interpret each of his results and to solve complex physics problems with inventiveness and maturity.

Extremely intense light pulses generated by Free-electron lasers (FELs) are versatile tools in research. In the X-ray range, they can be deployed to analyze the detail of atomic structures of a wide variety of materials and to follow fundamental ultrafast processes. Until now, FEL facilities are based on conventional electron accelerators, which make them long and expensive for XFELs.

As part of the future upgrade of SOLEIL, some technological innovations are necessary in order to be able to achieve the desired performance. Today, one of these innovations becomes a reality!

After the restart of the accelerators and the implementation of a specific organization, in particular around the Control Room, the beamlines restarted on Tuesday, May 26.

In a storage ring, an electron beam interacts with the vacuum chamber, generating wake fields that act back on the beam itself. The main effect of these fields is to limit the stored current because high current beams are excited up to the explosion that makes them lost. The use of the Transverse Feedback (TFB) allows alleviating this beam current limitation.

Marie Labat, member of the Sources division at the synchrotron facility SOLEIL, received on October 5th, 2015 the Jean-Louis Laclare prize of the Accelerator Division of the French Physicist Society.