SOLEIL

SOLEIL is the French synchrotron facility, located on the Saclay Plateau near Paris, with 29 beamlines in operation. It is a multi-disciplinary instrument and a research laboratory, whose mission is to run research programs using synchrotron radiation, to develop state-of-the-art instrumentation on the beamlines, and to make those available to the scientific community. SOLEIL, a unique tool for both academic research and industrial applications across a wide range of disciplines including physics, biology, chemistry, environmental and earth sciences, etc., is used by over 5 000 researchers coming from France and abroad. It is based on a state-of-the-art 3rd generation 2.75 GeV synchrotron source, both in terms of brilliance and stability, designed to cover a very wide range of techniques from infrared to hard x-rays.
The facility is a company employing about 450 people, whose shareholders are CNRS and CEA.