The Hefei Advanced Light Facility (HALF) in central China’s Anhui province fired its first electron beam on September 20 from a new facility that is developing a “super microscope.” Electrons generated by the gun were accelerated by a 630 ft. long linear accelerator until they reached 2.2 billion electron volts, a milestone for this fourth-generation light source. According to Hefei’s University of Science and Technology of China, the brightness of HALF and its stability were the highest in the world.

All the key equipment for HALF was domestically produced. Like other light source projects, HALF is designed to use extremely bright X-rays, generated by high-speed electrons spinning in magnetic fields, in order to observe the structure of matter at the atomic scale. Fourth-generation light sources control beams more precisely, and the X-rays produced by HALF will be more than 100 times brighter than those from third-generation sources.