Timeline
Synchrotron light
| 1873 | James Clerk Maxwell publishes his theory of electromagnetism. |
| 1895 | Wilhelm Röntgen discovers X-rays, for which he wins the inaugural Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. |
| 1897 | Sir Joseph Larmor shows mathematically that radiation is emitted by accelerated charged particles. |
| 1898 | Alfred-Marie Liénard realises particles moving in a circle will produce this radiation as a result of centripetal acceleration. Years later, this work was built on by George Adolphus Schott, the British mathematician, who published his classical work on electromagnetic radiation. |
| 1912 | Max von Laue obtains the first X-ray diffraction pattern of a crystal. |
| 1914 | Sir William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg in London and Manchester, respectively, extend the use of X-ray diffraction as a technique for determining crystal structure, for which they shared a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915. |
| 1946 | First synchrotron operates in Woolwich, UK. |
| 1947 | First observation of synchrotron light. |
| 1949 | American physicist Julian Schwinger documents the full theory of a relativistic electron on a circular path producing radiation. |
| 1953 | Structure of DNA solved using X-rays. |
| 1956 | First experiments using synchrotron light take place at Cornell, US. |
| 1959 | Max Perutz at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge uses X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of haemoglobin, for which he wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962. |
| 1964 | The DESY synchrotron in Germany begins operation for both high-energy physics and synchrotron-light experiments. |
| 1966 | First experiments in the UK at Glasgow synchrotron. |
| 1977 | First demonstration of free-electron-laser (FEL) principle at Stanford, US. |
| 1981 | The Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS) starts operating in Daresbury, UK. It is the first dedicated X-ray producing synchrotron source. |
| 1994 | The first third-generation synchrotron source, the ESRF in Grenoble, France, goes into operation. |
| 1997 | Sir John Walker wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the structure of Bovine F1 ATP synthase, based on research using the SRS. |
| 2000 | The SASE principle for an FEL is successfully demonstrated at DESY. |
| 2005 | FLASH, the first FEL in the soft X-ray range, goes into operation at DESY. |
| 2007 | The Diamond Light Source starts operation as a next-generation user facility in the UK. |
| 2008 | The SRS closes after 28 years of operation and 2 million hours of user beamtime. The Diamond Light Source takes over as the UK national facility. |
| 2009 | The Linac Coherent Light Source, the first hard X-ray XFEL, goes into operation in the US. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A Steitz and Ada E Yonath are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for revealing the structure of the ribosome, for which they used synchrotron light. |