China's high-energy radiation light source booster passes acceptance test

BEIJING, Nov. 17 (Xinhua) -- The booster of China's high-energy synchrotron radiation light source successfully passed the acceptance test Friday, with its key indicators higher than the design requirements and its overall performance reaching the international advanced level.

The light source, the High Energy Photon Source (HEPS), is one of China's major national science and technology infrastructure projects.

Like a supersized X-ray machine, it can accelerate electrons to near-light speed by three accelerators, including a linear accelerator, a booster, and a storage ring, and generate synchrotron radiation, which features strong penetrability and a high level of brightness, thus helping researchers observe microcosms.

According to Jiao Yi, a researcher from the Institute of High Energy Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with a circumference of about 454 meters, the booster is the second-stage accelerator to accelerate the electron beam from 500 MeV to 6 GeV.

Built by the Institute of High Energy Physics, HEPS is expected to become one of the brightest fourth-generation synchrotron radiation facilities worldwide after its construction is complete, and it will serve fields such as advanced materials, aerospace, and biomedicine.