Dr. Massimo Altarelli, European XFEL GmbH, Chairman of the Management Board
Physics – Room 481

This talk will summarize the status of the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser (European XFEL) near Hamburg, Germany. The start of operation of the LCLS at SLAC and of SACLA in Japan already produced impressive scientific results from these hard x-ray highly brilliant sources. The European facility is powered by a 17.5 GeV superconducting linear accelerator, that will generate a much larger number of pulses per second, up to 27,000. It shall also provide a mode of operation based on beam distribution to two or three experiments simultaneously, providing each of them with thousands of pulses per second. The scientific possibilities opened up by these capabilities are shortly described, together with the current instrumental developments (in optics, detectors, lasers, etc.) that are necessary to implement this program.