A survey of the Italian research in solid state physics by infrared spectroscopy with electron-beam sources

Two beamlines for the use of InfraRed Synchrotron Radiation (IRSR) are presently working in Italy, at the ELETTRA storage ring in Trieste, and at the collider DAFNE in Frascati. A third facility, SPARC in Frascati, has been equipped for the extraction of Terahertz radiation with the aim to perform pump-probe time-domain experiments. Here we describe those apparata and we review the main results that the Italian groups have obtained therein, in recent years, in solid-state physics. We also describe the experiments performed in collaboration with the storage ring BESSY in Berlin, for the exploitation of Coherent Synchrotron Radiation, and the terahertz beam line recently implemented at SPARC, the Free Electron Laser of Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati