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Construction of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) is proceeding at a quick pace with a planned completion date of March 2009. The US$379M project will build the world’s first hard x-ray free electron laser (FEL). When fully operational, the LCLS will produce 100-200fs pulses of 10^12-10^13 x-rays of 0.15-1.5nm at 120Hz. The injector, including laser, electron gun, 135MeV injector linac, and the first of the main SLAC linac sections up to the first bunch compressor is currently being commissioned. First electrons off of the photocathode were observed on April 5, as of April 14, up to 330pC of charge has been accelerated up to 250MeV. Downstream systems are making good progress with all 40 of the undulators delivered to SLAC. Civil construction is progressing rapidly with tunnels being dug, and concrete being poured for the beam transport hall and near experimental hall. Beneficial occupancy of the halls is expected towards the end of 2007. Experimental end-stations are being developed at SLAC under the LCLS and LCLC Ultrafast Science Instruments (LUSI) projects to address four scientific areas: Atomic, Molecular and Optical (AMO) Physics, X-ray Pump-Probe (XPP), X-ray Correlation Spectroscopy (XCS) and Coherent X-ray Imaging (CXI). A description of the LCLS project, update on the construction status, and brief discussion of the first experiments will be presented.
This work is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC02-76SF00515.
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