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Hefei’s Hefei Advanced Light Facility nears full operation after key beam test

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September 22, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

The linear accelerator at China’s Hefei Advanced Light Facility (HALF) successfully delivered an electron beam on Sunday, a key step toward establishing a leading fourth-generation synchrotron radiation facility. Operating at a designed energy of 2.2 gigaelectronvolts, HALF will generate soft X-rays with more than 100 times higher brightness and coherence than existing third-generation sources.

“Successful beam generation and delivery means that we have taken a key step toward the ultimate goal,” said He Zhigang, chief engineer of the injector system. Once operational, HALF will provide a platform for advanced studies in materials science, life sciences, and energy research for scientists both within China and internationally.

HALF Achieves First Electron Beam Delivery via Linear Accelerator

This initial beam delivery confirms the functionality of the 2.2 gigaelectronvolt linear accelerator, the component responsible for initiating the process of generating synchrotron radiation at the facility. This leap in performance will enable researchers to probe matter at resolutions, facilitating advancements in understanding microscopic particle behavior and the structure of light elements. Researchers anticipate the ability to analyze changes in the electronic, chemical, and spin states of materials with greater precision and sensitivity across spatial, temporal, and energy domains.

Currently, the project is transitioning into a commissioning phase focused on injecting the generated electron beam into the storage ring. Once fully operational, HALF will complement existing synchrotron radiation sources in China by extending research capabilities into a different energy range.

The facility is expected to be a shared research platform for scientists both domestically and internationally, fostering collaboration in fields like quantum information, energy, environment, and life sciences. HALF’s capabilities will support research in areas including high-temperature superconductivity, new energy batteries, aerospace engineering, biomedicine, and the development of advanced materials. The institution, located in Hefei, Anhui Province, represents a major national science and technology infrastructure project designed to push the boundaries of materials science, life sciences, and energy science.

Successful beam generation and delivery means that we have taken a key step toward the ultimate goal. The electron beam produced by the linear accelerator is the source of synchrotron radiation. Its beam quality, stability and reliability directly affect the performance of the storage ring and the downstream beamlines and experiments.

He Zhigang, chief engineer of the injector system
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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