Spain’s new synchrotron light source, Alba, is on track to come on line in about a year in Cerdanyola del Vallès, near Barcelona. An inauguration ceremony was held for the facility last month, during Spain’s rotation in the European Union presidency.
Employing mostly proven technologies, the 3-GeV Alba—Spanish for “dawn light”—will be a state-of-the-art facility on a par with Soleil in France, Diamond in the UK, and others. The first seven beamlines will be a mix of soft x rays—for applications in materials science, solid-state physics, biology, chemistry, and medicine—and hard x rays for crystallography and absorption studies. The plan is to eventually equip the synchrotron with up to 32 beamlines around its 270-meter circumference.
Light sources like Alba (see photo) are popping up around the world, thanks in part to developments at higher-energy facilities, namely the 6-GeV European Synchrotron Research Facility in France, the 7-GeV Advanced Photon Source...
