RECENT PROGRESS OF THE SPring-8 FACILITY

Since October 1997, the SPring-8 facility has been operated well and provided high quality photon beams for users. Over this period, various kinds of improvements have been carried out to achieve brilliant and stable photon beams and to make the most of 8-GeV potentiality. At the same time R&D has continued for future radiation sources. In these activities, the largest achievement has been the construction of magnet-free long straight sections (LSS’s). Owing to a sufficient preparatory study, the LSS’s were successfully commissioned and user operation was re-started in October 2000. This paper presents a recent progress overview of the SPring-8 facility. 1 SPring-8 ACCELERATOR COMPLEX The SPring-8 facility is a highly brilliant X-ray source providing photon beams having an energy range of from 0.2 to several hundreds keV. It is composed of a 1-GeV injector linac, an 8-GeV booster synchrotron and an 8GeV storage ring [1]. The construction of the SPring-8 facility started in 1990 and the beam commissioning of the storage ring started in the middle of March 1997. By way of the smooth beam commissioning the user operation started in October 1997. Since completion of the commissioning, the SPring-8 facility has been operated well and the total user time has reached more than 12800 hours, 70% of the total beam time. Over this period, the beam time per year is smoothly growing from 1271 hours in 1997 to 4973 hours in 2000. Before 2001 the storage ring was usually operated with a cycle of three weeks. To increase the user time, operation with a cycle of four weeks was recently introduced [2].