La conquête de Soleil

Soleil, source de lumière élaborée au Lure, laboratoire d’Orsay, entre 1989 et1999, voit son évolution stoppée par décision du ministre de la Recherche en août 1999. Il faudra un peu plus d’un an de mobilisation des communautés scientifiques nationales et internationales pour inverser la décision. La construction du laboratoire Soleil démarre en 2000 sur le plateau de Saclay et les premiers faisceaux sont extraits en 2006. L’article relate les étapes de cette gestation. Il décrit également les problèmes posés aux personnels par le statut de société civile adopté pour ce grand instrument.The SOLEIL facility, a light source designed in LURE, Orsay laboratory, between 1989 and 1999, has been given up by a governmental decision in august 1999. The national and international scientific communities joined together to change the decision. The building of the laboratory itself started in 2000 and the first beams were extracted in 2006. This article summarizes the construction stages of the french synchrotron center and also describes the problems induced on the employees by the status of public company.

SOLEIL Status Report

International audienceSOLEIL is both a synchrotron light source and a research laboratory at the cutting edge of experimental techniques dedicated to matter analysis down to the atomic scale, as well as a service platform open to all scientific and industrial communities. This French 2.75 GeV third generation synchrotron light source provides today extremely stable photon beams to 29 beamlines (BLs) complementary to ESRF. We report facility performance, ongoing projects and recent major achievements. A significant work was performed in order to secure the operation of the two canted 5.5 mm in-vacuum cryogenic permanent magnet undulators (CPMUs). Major R&D areas will also be discussed, and progress towards a lattice baseline for making SOLEIL a diffraction limited storage ring