On Oct 29, the High Energy Photon Source (HEPS) achieved its historical milestone: it passed the performance acceptance organized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

The HEPS, one of the key projects listed in the 13th Five-year Plan for national major scientific and technological infrastructure construction, is designed to deliver the world’s brightest hard X-rays, meeting the urgent needs for high-energy, high-brightness and high-coherence X-rays in original and innovative research for both basic and engineering sciences. The project commenced in June 2019. Over the past six years, the HEPS team built up this huge machine, remarkable as Asia’s first fourth generation synchrotron radiation facility.

The finish of acceptance tests puts HEPS at the top list of the world’s synchrotron X-ray research facilities, marking one generation leap for China’s synchrotron radiation capabilities. Its electron beam emittance achieved 57pm·rad under 100 milliamps beam current. A suite of world-class performance beamlines has been commissioned, such as state-of-the-art the hard x-ray imaging beamline and the structural dynamics beamline. Early experiments have fully demonstrated HEPS’s exceptional capabilities: deep penetration, ultra-high brightness and coherence. HEPS is now poised to serve as a premier platform for original and innovative research across basic and engineering sciences and will open to global users in 2026.

An aerial shot of the HEPS project site in June 2025. (Credit IHEP)

HEPS announced the successful demonstration of swap-out injection based on high-energy accumulation in the booster in Jan 2025. (Credit IHEP)

NEG-coating system was developed by HEPS. (Credit IHEP)

A Mango wiggler is developed to achieve a wider field of view, and higher resolution. (Credit IHEP)

The HEPS-developeddouble-edge X-ray wavefront metrology was employed to address the challenge of characterizing blurred wavefronts, achieving high-precision and high-resolution measurement of the Laue bent crystal wavefront. (Credit IHEP)

A “complete software ecosystem” was developed to cover the life cycle of synchrotron experiments. (Credit IHEP)

Hard X-Ray High Resolution Spectroscopy Beamline is the first dedicated hard X-ray inelastic scattering spectroscopy beamline in China. (Credit IHEP)

The hard X-ray nanoprobe multimodal imaging beamline (NAMI) is dedicated to the nano-scale in-situ scientific research. (Credit IHEP)

The hard X-ray imaging beamline is the longest one in the HEPS Phase I, with the distance from the sample to light source being approximately 330m. (Credit IHEP)

The Structural Dynamics Beamline (SDB), one of the long beamline in Phase I, focuses on the single shot detection of irreversible processes upon dynamics loading or during the additive manufacturing. (Credit IHEP)