Welcome to LCLS on the web.

I can only hope that this site communicates a fraction of the excitement we at SLAC feel as we construct this huge scientific instrument and bring it to its full capability in 2009 and 2010.

The LCLS grew out of a 1992 proposal to turn SLAC's two-mile long accelerator into an Angstrom-range free-electron laser. Since then, the formidable challenges associated with building this machine, as well as its potential for discovery, have come into clearer focus. In 2001, the US Department of Energy took the decision to make the LCLS happen.

You can think of the LCLS as working like the flash lamp on a camera. The big difference is that the flash of light is an extremely intense burst of X-rays. The LCLS will be used to make stop-action photographs of atoms as they break free of molecules, or the atom-by-atom progress of a shock wave traveling through a crystal, or even the detailed arrangement of atoms in a single complex molecule.

Hundreds of people at SLAC as well as at Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UCLA have been working toward the goal of giving the world's research community this "gift," the LCLS. Starting in 2009, we will begin to see what gifts and surprises we will get back from the physicists, chemists, and biologists who will come to conduct their research at LCLS.