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The Advanced Light Source, a public Department of Energy X ray user facility at Berkeley Lab, is replacing the magnets in the storage ring of its particle accelerator so its soft X ray beams — the longer wavelength end of the X ray spectrum — come
Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source is in the middle of an unusual upgrade: the lab is pulling the magnets out of its particle accelerator and putting new ones in, so the soft X-ray beams it sends into user experiments line up in phase instead of arriving jumbled.
Coherence is what turns a brighter beam into a more useful one. The lab's "100x brighter" figure counts photons; coherence determines whether those photons can resolve a sample's own features or arrive scrambled with the sample's disorder mixed in.
The Advanced Light Source, or ALS, is a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, according to LBNL Newscenter. For more than 30 years, outside researchers have brought samples there to study materials and molecules with intense infrared, ultraviolet, and X-ray light. The lab counts 18,000+ cited papers and five Nobel prizes tied to work at the facility. The upgrade is targeted for completion in 2029.
Inside the ALS storage ring, electrons race around at nearly the speed of light, and arrays of magnets bend them so they radiate X-rays. The existing magnets produce beams with enough photons to do useful work, but those photons are out of phase with each other: peaks and valleys arrive at the sample at different times, so the image the researchers see mixes disorder in the sample with disorder in the beam.
The upgrade replaces those magnets with newer, more compact ones arranged to produce waves that hit the sample in step. Berkeley Lab says the result will be soft X-ray light that is "100x brighter and nearly fully coherent" compared to the current source.
When waves line up, peaks reinforce peaks and valleys cancel valleys, so the pattern that lands on the detector reflects the sample's own features rather than a sum of sample and instrument. That separation is what imaging modes such as ptychography and coherent diffraction need to reconstruct atomic-scale chemical and electronic structure from the scattered X-ray pattern.
Soft X-rays, the longer-wavelength end of the X-ray spectrum, are the right probe for that work. They interact with a sample's electrons in ways that reveal chemical state and electronic structure, not just geometry.
The lab's explainer names several areas where the new beams will matter. In battery research, the new coherence should let scientists map electrode chemistry at the atomic scale and tell whether the disorder they see is intrinsic to the material or an artifact of the beam. In quantum materials, sharper beams support finer electronic-structure maps of correlated and topological systems. In geology and planetary science, the same capability yields finer chemical fingerprints in samples such as lunar rocks. The lab also lists applications in microelectronics, EUV lithography, X-ray crystallography, small-angle X-ray scattering, AI model training on ALS datasets, and the Quantum Systems Accelerator program.
The list is the lab's own. None of those domains gets a working battery or a working quantum computer out of the upgrade on its own. What they get is a measurement: a way to ask a question they could not cleanly ask before.
The 100x and 2029 figures are lab-self-reported in the LBNL Newscenter coverage of the upgrade and a companion planning article describing the project's program framing. Both are Berkeley Lab's own primary channels; independent DOE or peer confirmation of the 100x performance figure has not been published alongside them.
The upgrade is also not the only one of its kind. The ESRF-EBS in Grenoble and the APS-U at Argonne have already delivered diffraction-limited storage-ring performance in their respective energy ranges. The upgraded ALS is joining that cohort for the soft X-ray regime, not leaping past it. That is the comparison point a non-beat reader needs to keep the "100x" number in proportion: 100x is against today's ALS, not against the worldwide state of the art.
The new ring changes which questions researchers can answer cleanly. The first user experiments after the 2029 target date will show which of the named research areas the new beams move the most.