ALBA Synchrotron and its future

Abstract

The ALBA Synchrotron light source is the Spanish national facility, providing extended research capabilities and a wide range of state-of-the-art instrumentation to academic and industrial users of the Spanish and European Research Area since 2012. It includes ten operating beamlines, two beamlines in commissioning and two more in construction. JEMCA (Joint Electron Microscopy Center at ALBA), a center including advanced electron microscopes, developed in collaboration with partner institutions, has recently been inaugurated. The next years will be dedicated to exploit the existing instrumentation, and in parallel prepare the upgrade toward a fourth generation synchrotron source, by combining the partial substitution of the accelerators with the upgrade of the existing instrumentation, the addition of new cutting-edge beamlines, the development of further capabilities for automatization, simulation, prototyping, nanotechnology and advanced optics, and the extension of the infrastructure in the nearby plots, which will host the new long beamline end-stations and aim at being the seed of a science, technology and innovation park. The 2-year dark period is foreseen for the end of this decade. The status of the facility, few scientific highlights, and the plans for the future are described.