At the Advanced Light Source (ALS) of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), we are proposing the construction of CIRCE (Coherent InfraRed Center), a ring-based photon source completely optimized for the generation of coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR) in the terahertz frequency range [1]. CIRCE exploits the full complement of the CSR-production mechanisms presently available for obtaining top performance, including a photon flux exceeding by more than nine orders of magnitude that of existing "conventional" broadband terahertz sources.
