20 year anniversary of a great idea: building the LCLS @ SLAC

The spectacular success of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), the world’s first hard X-ray free-electron laser, has put SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at the frontier of photon science. Although relevant work was done by many scientists 30 or more years ago, the idea for the LCLS at SLAC really got started 20 years ago, when 146 scientists from around the world gathered here in 1992 – from Feb. 24 to Feb. 27 – for the Workshop on Fourth Generation Light Sources.