Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) is working to address the needs of the primary scientific Grand Challenges now being considered by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences: we are exploring scientific discovery opportunities, and new areas of science, to be unlocked with the use of advanced photon sources. A partnership of several divisions at LBNL is working to define the science and instruments needed in the future. To meet these needs, we propose a seeded, high-repetition-rate, free-electron laser (FEL) facility. Temporally and spatially coherent photon pulses, of controlled duration ranging from picosecond to sub-femtosecond, are within reach in the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) to soft X-ray regime, and LBNL is developing critical accelerator physics and technologies toward this goal. We envision a facility with an array of FELs, each independently configurable and tunable, providing a range of photon-beam properties with high average and peak flux and brightness.