Meeting Reports: Energy-Recovering Linacs for Next-Generation Light Sources

Energy-recovering linear accelerators (ERLs) have the potential of providing two orders of magnitude increase in brightness over third-generation sources while offering bunch lengths as low as tens of femtoseconds for timing experiments. ERLs are different from storage rings in that the electron bunches circulate once only. Thus they are not at equilibrium, and in particular can be packed much more tightly than in storage rings, resulting in brighter sources. However, dumping a 100 mA, 3 GeV beam that carries 300 MW of energy is not practical, so the energy is recovered, and the devices are in some sense energystorage rings.