Status and Future Development Plans for the MAX IV Light Sources: pushing further towards high brightness and coherence.

The commissioning of the MAX IV synchrotron radiation facility in Lund marks the dawn of a new generation of storage-ring-based light sources. This new generation delivers orders-of-magnitude higher performance and allows realization of groundbreaking experiments on a variety of systems and materials at the atomic and molecular levels. This talk reviews the conceptual basis of the MAX IV design, summarizes the most recent accelerator commissioning results and explores future development paths for the MAX IV light sources aimed at achieving the diffraction limit at hard X-ray wavelengths.