Societé Civile Synchrotron SOLEIL – Synchrotron SOLEIL (SOLEIL)

Synchrotron SOLEIL is the French national synchrotron facility created by CNRS and CEA. It is a 3rd generation source of synchrotron radiation, operating at an energy of 2.75 GeV and stored beam currents (top-up injection) of 430 mA, rising to 500 mA by the end of 2014.

SOLEIL offers a unique panorama of experiments with 26 beamlines in operation (29 foreseen in 2016), covering the far IR to the hard X-ray range, and open to a large scientific and industrial users community in a very broad range of fields from life sciences to material science including surface, solid states and gas phase physics and chemistry, geosciences and cultural heritage sciences.

The 3rd generation of synchrotrons is characterized by a massive use of straight sections equipped with undulators and wigglers as well as by a natural very low emittance. SOLEIL undulators are tailor-made to best meet the needs of users. This setup leads to orders of magnitude higher brilliance than conventional bending magnets and laboratory sources. Associated to high stability and “infinite” lifetime (one of the strength of SOLEIL which works in ‘top up’ mode to have a constant heat load on the optics), these exceptional characteristics allow considerable advance in the quality of the measurements as compared to those obtained via classical laboratory sources or with the previous generation of synchrotron sources. Moreover, the SOLEIL source operates in different modes (hybrid, 8 bunch, single bunch, low alpha) to fit the specific requirements of users.

Users are hosted at the various beamlines by a local contact (one of the scientists working on a given beamline) who will assist users in conducting the experiment at various levels: preparation of the experiment, data acquisition and data treatment.

SOLEIL offers a combination of advanced facilities and a very high level of expert advice / support for users, with supporting scientists being available between 08:00 and 23:00. Since 2008, SOLEIL has welcomed more than 5700 users coming from 1420 laboratories (from France, Europe and overseas) to carry out research at SOLEIL. With over 950 new users and 197 new laboratories in 2013, SOLEIL counted 2037 users from 703 laboratories for this year only. Considering SOLEIL as a whole, about 34 % of the users come from foreign institutions (out of which 82 % from EU and associated countries).

Contact Person
Paul Morin

E-Mail Address
paul.morin@synchrotron-soleil.fr