LCLS 10 Years

LCLS celebrated 10 years of operation. What a pleasure to see what the team and the international community have achieved! Real innovative instrumentation enabling unique science. But it also showed the long time-scales on which such projects are conceived, funded, built, and operated. It takes not only years, but decades to accomplish such a breakthrough.

To me synchrotrons and FELs are the two complementary tools of the trade. They each offer unique and complementary properties. The synchrotron is the Swiss Army Knife of Science while the FEL is the Lightsaber.

This event was a proud moment for the LCLS team and for all the supporters at SLAC and the scientific users and collaborators from around the world.

No surprise that Mike Dunne is happy to pose with his great tool.

Congratulations to the team and thanks to all who believed in them and allowed them to go ahead with an idea that seemed crazy at the time.