Due to the high intensity of synchrotron light (SL) in the IR, UV, and X-ray region, almost every experiment or process using these energies can be dramatically enhanced using SL—compared to any traditional laboratory source. By the early 1990s, the chemistry community in Canada in particular had realized the importance of SL. As a result, many beamline groups began to form.

The initial beamlines being built at the CLS (see the following Table 1— as of February 2001) span the entire useful energy range of SL—the far IR (beamline 1), the IR (beamlines 2 and 3), the soft X-ray region (beamlines 4 and 5), and the hard X-ray region (beamlines 6 and 7). A diagnostic beamline (beamline 8) is also being built to monitor the electron beam characteristics in the storage ring.

Many other beamline proposals have been developed (such as beamlines 9 to 12), and a number of these will be built in the next few years.

Table 1: Canadian Light Source Beamlines (as of February 2001)

	Beamline Project	Source	Energy Range	Project Leader	CLS Co-ordinator
1	High Res. Far Infrared Spectroscopy	BM	0.01 – 0.13 eV	Robert McKellar, Tom Ellis	T. May
2	Infrared Spectromicroscopy	BM	0.08 – 0.8 eV	Mike Jackson, Tom Ellis	T. May
3	Infrared Spectromicroscopy	BM	0.08 – 0.8 eV	Farid Bensebaa, Tom Ellis	T. May
4	CSRF SGM	U	0.22 – 1.9 keV	T.K. Sham	I. Coulthard
5	Soft X-ray Spectromicroscopy	EPU	0.2 – 2.0 keV	Adam Hitchcock	K. Kaznacheyev
6	Protein Crystallography	SG-U	6.5 – 18 keV	Louis Delbaere	P. Grochulski
7	General purpose XAFS	W	5 – 40 keV	DeTong Jiang	D. Jiang
8	Facility Diagnostic	BM	- (white)	Jack Bergstrom	J. Bergstrom
9	CSRF PGM	U	5 – 250 eV	T.K. Sham	J. Cutler, K. Tan
10	CSRF DCM	BM	1.7 – 5.5 keV	T.K. Sham	E. Hallin
11	General purpose Diffraction	W	4 – 40 keV	John Tse	D. Jiang
12	X-ray Micro-probe/Diffraction	SG-U	4 – 40 keV	Don Baker	D. Jiang

SL is essential for all these studies. For example, IR imaging on biological and industrial samples can be performed now at synchrotrons with wavelengths of 3-5 µm resolution—compared to 30 µm available with a laboratory source. In addition, single crystal diffraction can be obtained on much smaller crystals, and at much better atomic resolution than with laboratory sources. Indeed, all protein crystallographers (over 40 groups in Canada now) must go to a synchrotron source in order to be competitive, and a significant number (10 to 20 percent) of small crystals from all chemistry and geology departments will probably require the CLS for structure determination. Among the other benefits? Soft X-ray surface science techniques, such as X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, are enhanced dramatically and other resonance techniques are being developed that are not possible with single- or double-energy laboratory sources. These imaging techniques (with scanning transmission and photoemission X-ray microscopes and the X-ray microprobe) are simply not available in the laboratory because they require intense continuous X-ray sources. These X-ray techniques are becoming essential for many surface, polymer, mineralogical, environmental, and high-pressure investigations. The absorption spectroscopies (that is, XANES and EXAFS) are extremely powerful for obtaining the chemistry (and microchemistry) of all elements in any medium such as gas, solution, and crystalline and amorphous solids (for example, in many environmental and biochemical areas).