The Canadian Light Source — History and scientific prospects

Abstract

The Canadian Light Source (CLS) in Saskatoon has been under construction for the last 4 years, and will be producing a number of very intense beams of far-IR, IR, soft and hard X-rays in 2004 for use by several hundred Canadian scientists in chemistry, surface and material science, and a host of other scientific disciplines. The CLS will dramatically enhance the Canadian spectroscopic tradition that Gerhard Herzberg help create. I begin this article (from my 2002 CIC Montreal Medal lecture) with an overview of the history of SR in Canada, beginning in 1972 with the first Canadian synchrotron workshop organized at the University of Western Ontario by Bill McGowan, and attended by Dr. Herzberg. The CLS facility is then described, along with the properties of the first and second set of beamlines to be built at the CLS. These SR beams, in the IR and X-ray regions from the third generation CSL ring, will be competitive in brightness and intensity with the best beamlines in the world for most applications. Finally, some of the present Canadian SR research at foreign SR sources is described across the entire SR spectrum. All known spectroscopic and diffraction experiments are dramatically enhanced with SR; and SR opens up new areas of spectroscopy, microscopy, and spectromicroscopy that cannot be studied with any other source of radiation.Key words: synchrotron light, X-rays, infrared, spectroscopy.