During the past three to four decades, synchrotron radiation has had a revolutionary impact on many fields of science and technology, from material science to biomedical imaging. The Compact Light Source (CLS) is a breakthrough technology that directly addresses the increasing demand for access to these high quality X-rays by offering the possibility of a synchrotron beamline for home laboratory applications. With it, scientists can experience a new level of productivity by having access to local, on-demand synchrotron light.

The CLS is a small tunable X-ray source that can fit into a typical experimenters laboratory and can be used in much the same way as an X-ray beamline at a large synchrotron facility. The CLS enables the application of a vast array of new technologies developed by X-ray scientists at the national synchrotron laboratories around the world. It builds on the U.S. investment in large synchrotrons, but with a new idea that allows the source to be very compact. Conventional synchrotron light sources employ multi-GeV electron beams that are stored in large rings of magnets to generate intense, bright, 1 Å wavelength radiation. The CLS employs an electron beam and laser beam to accomplish the same effect. The shift from periodic magnets used in a typical synchrotron light source, to the laser beam used in the CLS, allows a reduction of energy and scale by a factor 200 - a stadium size machine becomes a room size machine!

Perhaps the most exciting new applications for the CLS are in health care. New biological imaging techniques that provide exquisitely detailed images of soft tissue are being developed at the synchrotron facilities. The CLS matches key aspects of the X-ray quality of these beamlines, but at cost and scale that makes clinical applications of these powerful techniques practical. We believe that the Compact Light Source will ultimately improve our nation's health and impact millions of individual lives through better understanding of disease, more effective drug development, and by enabling clinical applications of emerging new techniques for biological imaging.