Beller Lecture (2021): The Future Grand Challenges for Synchrotron and Free Electron Laser Light sources

From the early days of ancient philosophers, the light-matter interaction is unveiling the intimate interplay between complexity and the laws that govern the structure of matter.

Nowadays, Synchrotrons and Free Electron Lasers (FELs) are asked to play a fundamental role as “super-microscopes” operating in the frequency and time domain of the direct and reciprocal space.

The radiation generated by these sources is thousands of billion times brighter than those produced by conventional light devices. The path to the future is to unlock the gate to unprecedented tailoring and control of the photon properties from THz to the hard X-ray spectral region achieving the possibility to generate fully coherent, variable polarization and tunable, ultra-short radiation pulses at a high repetition rate.

In these perspectives Synchrotrons and FELs will be critical to meet the challenges of climate change, advanced communications and computing systems, quantum materials design and properties, along with old and new infectious diseases, as the world faces currently with the SARS-COVID19 and SARS-CoV-2 pandemics.