The Materials Science beamline at the Swiss Light Source has been operational since 2001. In late 2010, the original wiggler source was replaced with a novel insertion device, which allows unprecedented access to high photon energies from an undulator installed in a medium-energy storage ring. In order to best exploit the increased brilliance of this new source, the entire front-end and optics had to be redesigned. In this work, the upgrade of the beamline is described in detail. The tone is didactic, from which it is hoped the reader can adapt the concepts and ideas to his or her needs.

No abstract

The Swiss Light Source (SLS) at the Paul Scherrer Institute (

Modern 3rd generation synchrotron light sources aim for 100% availability. No single beam interruption is acceptable and every beam disturbance should be investigated: what caused the interruption? Can it be avoided in the future? If it cannot be avoided, how can the recovery be accelerated? An automated event recording system has been implemented at the Swiss Light Source (SLS) in order to simplify beam distortion investigations with respect to a well-defined metrics. The system identifies beam disturbances and records automatically the type and duration of the event. Relevant information of the event, like control system archive data or shift summaries, is linked to the event and presented in Web pages. Tools for the automated evaluation of alarm logs are provided that generate summaries of a beam distortion. On the basis of this information each event will be assigned to a failure cause. The means to filter the events are provided. We will describe the concept and the implementation of the system at the SLS and our experiences with it. Finally, the SLS operation event logging system will be compared with failure analysis at other light sources.

Storage ring light sources aim for high operational reliability. Very often beam availability is used as an operation metric to measure the reliability. A survey of several light sources reveals that the calculation of availability varies significantly between facilities. This complicates useful comparisons of reliability. Furthermore the beam availability does not provide insight regarding reliability of beam characteristics such as orbit and beam size stability. The authors propose specific metrics to evaluate the reliability of storage ring light sources; these metrics allow a detailed and meaningful comparison across facilities. Such comparisons are useful to further optimize the reliability of storage ring light source facilities.