SOLEIL ("Sun" in French) is a synchrotron facility near

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

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. It performed its first acceleration of

electron The electron ( or ) is a subatomic particle with a negative one elementary electric charge. Electrons belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family, and are generally thought to be elementary particles because they have no ...

s on May 14, 2006. The name ''SOLEIL'' is a

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for ''Source optimisée de lumière d’énergie intermédiaire du LURE'' (LURE optimised intermediary energy light source), LURE meaning ''Laboratoire pour l'utilisation du rayonnement électromagnétique''. The facility is run by a civil corporation held by the

French National Centre for Scientific Research The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,63 ...

(CNRS) and the

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(CEA), two French national research agencies. It is located in Saint-Aubin in the

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, a south-western suburb of Paris, near

Gif-sur-Yvette Gif-sur-Yvette (, literally ''Gif on Yvette'') is a commune in south-western Ile de France, France. It is located from the center of Paris. Geography The town is crossed by and named after the river Yvette. The total area is and is green s ...

and

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, which host other facilities for nuclear and

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. The facility is an associate member of the

University of Paris-Saclay Paris-Saclay University (french: Université Paris-Saclay) is a public research university based in Paris, France. It is one of the 13 prestigious universities that emerged from the division of the University of Paris, also known as the Sorbonne. ...

. SOLEIL also host
IPANEMA, the European research platform on ancient materials (archaeology, palaeontology, past environments and cultural heritage)
a joint CNRS / French Ministry of Culture and Communication research unit. SOLEIL covers fundamental research needs in physics, chemistry, material sciences, life sciences (notably in the crystallography of biological macromolecules), earth sciences, and atmospheric sciences. It offers the use of a wide range of spectroscopic methods from infrared to X-rays, and structural methods such as X-ray diffraction and diffusion.

Main parameters

SOLEIL contains electrons travelling with an energy of 2.75 GeV around a 354 m circumference. It takes the electrons 1.2 μs to travel around this ring at almost the speed of light; 847,000 times per second.

Main parameters

Notable Experiments

References

External links