Advanced Light Source

The Advanced Light Source (ALS) is a third-generation synchrotron, a specialized particle accelerator that generates bright beams of x-rays for scientific research. It is located in a building originally designed in the 1930s by Arthur Brown, Jr.— architect of the Coit Tower in San Francisco—to house Ernest O. Lawrence’s 184-inch cyclotron. In 1987, a $99.5-million construction project, funded by the US Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences, began to reconfigure the building to accommodate the ALS accelerator and beamlines. Completed in 1993, the ALS is a national user facility that now attracts more than 2000 researchers and students annually from around the world.