May 4 2009
Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), a third-generation of synchrotron radiation light source, is completed and ready for use.
Located in Shanghai Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park, the 1,200-million-yuan mega project is the largest scientific platform in China up to now. The construction of the project took 52 months with the joint efforts of CAS and Shanghai municipal government. Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP) of CAS plays a leading role in the construction with supports from other institutes.
The silver facility occupies 200,000 square meters and looks like a huge stadium from outside. Inside it mainly consists of three accelerators: a 150Mev electron LINAC, a 180-meter booster that can increase the electron energy from 150MeV to 3.5GeV in 0.5 second, and a 3.5GeV electron storage ring with a perimeter of 432 meters.
The first ready-to-use beamlines and experimental stations inlucde macromolecular crystallography station, XAFS station, hard X-ray microfocus and application station, X-ray imaging and biomedical application station, soft X-ray spectromicroscopy station, diffraction station and small angle X-ray scattering station.
Synchrotron Radiation is the fourth generation light source after eletronic, X-Ray and laser. By the standard of power, SSRF is the fourth largest one in the world, after only Japanese Spring-8, American APS, and European ESRF. It is able to construct more than 60 beamlines and provide various synchrotron radiation to more than a hundred experimental stations at the same time.
By the end of March, SINAP has received more than 300 applications from both domestic and international science communities, by far exceeding the 5000 research hours SSRF can provide.