The LAL-LURE accelerator complex, a new EPS historic site

The Linear Accelerator Laboratory (LAL) was set up at Orsay in 1956 to build and operate a state-of-the-art linear accelerator (linac) that would provide high intensity electron and positron beams of 1 GeV or more. Later on, in the early seventies the Laboratory for the Use of Electromagnetic radiation (LURE) was set up in close technical connection to LAL to make full use of the synchrotron light available at the Orsay Storage Ring (ACO) built by LAL in 1962-65, and to develop a wide research programme including such fields as materials science, chemistry or structural biology. LURE has given birth to SOLEIL, the French third generation synchrotron located a few kilometers away from Orsay, on the Saclay plateau. LAL is still a major laboratory whose research activities range from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, from the LHC to the Planck satellite