Status of the SACLA Facility

This article reports the current status of SACLA, SPring-8 Angstrom Compact free electron LAser, which has been producing stable X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) light since 2012. A unique injector system and a short-period in-vacuum undulator enable the generation of ultra-short coherent X-ray pulses with a wavelength shorter than 0.1 nm. Continuous development of accelerator technologies has steadily improved XFEL performance, not only for normal operations but also for fast switching operation of the two beamlines. After upgrading the broadband spontaneous-radiation beamline to produce soft X-ray FEL with a dedicated electron beam driver, it is now possible to operate three FEL beamlines simultaneously. Beamline/end-station instruments and data acquisition/analyzation systems have also been upgraded to allow advanced experiments. These efforts have led to the production of novel results and will offer exciting new opportunities for users from many fields of science.