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Bird's eye view of the 300-meter-long FLASH user facility: the experimental hall (left), the FLASH tunnel (middle, between the ponds) and the FEL hall (right).
User Facility Information
FLASH is a unique source of extremely bright, coherent, and ultrashort pulses of extreme-ultraviolet radiation and soft X-rays enabling researchers to explore the temporal evolution of physical, chemical, and biochemical processes happening in femtoseconds or picoseconds.
FLASH produces laser light of short wavelengths from the extreme ultraviolet down to soft X-rays (wavelength range of the fundamental: 4.5 - 47 nm).
The light comes in pulses, as in an electronic flashlight, but the pulses are a 100 billion times shorter (pulse duration 10-100 fs). At free-electron lasers (FELs), one obtains in light flashes of only 10 fs duration as many photons as what can be obtained per second from the best X-ray sources today.
Front of the FLASH experiment hall.
Its peak brilliance is one billion times more intense than that of the best light sources today (peak brilliance: 1029-1030 [photons/(s mrad2 mm2 0.1% BW]).
The femtosecond light pulses emerge from the undulator in the accelerator tunnel and can be delivered to five experimental stations in the FLASH experiment hall by the photon beam transport system operating under high vacuum conditions. In order to make efficient use of the FEL radiation, it can be steered to different experimental stations just by switching one or two plane mirrors by remote control. However, only one experimental station can be served at a time.
