Status of X-FEL/SPring-8 machine construction

XFEL/SPring-8: the X-ray free electron laser facility is under construction, which is aiming at generating coherent, high intensity, ultra-short femto-second X-ray pulse at wavelength of 1 A or shorter. XFEL will contribute to new science, such as, the single bio-molecular imaging, the pump-probe experiment in femto-second time-resolution, the high-temperature plasma experiment and basic physics under high electro-magnetic field. Year 2009 is the fourth year of five year project, the facility building construction has been completed in March 2009, and about 70% of hardware components have been made, whose installation has been started in July 2009. The high power operation of accelerator will start in October 2010, followed by the beam commissioning in March 2011. The first X-ray beam will be delivered to the user facility in 2011. (author)