LNLS: a success history
The first Brazilian Synchrotron Light Source was designed in 1983 and became operational 14 years later, in 1997. Building a “big machine” to do physics in Brazil had already been considered in early 50′s, when the National Research Council planned a sincrocíclotron. The project did not take off due to administrative and technical problems. The second attempt, an FINEP´s initiative, around 1960, also aborted.
In 1979, during the Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC) meeting, in Fortaleza, the built of a linear protons accelerator to investigate prions and others elementary particles came back to the agenda, as told by Léa Velho and Osvaldo Pessoa Jr in article “Decision-Making in the Implementation of the National Synchrotron Light Laboratory”.
The proposal was supported by the Brazilian Center for Physics Research (CBPF) and by the end of 1981 the idea of building an electron accelerator to study the synchrotron radiation was presented to Lynaldo Albuquerque, president of CNPq.
In 1983, an Executive Committee was named for the Synchrotron Radiation Project (SRP) and, in the following year, a Scientific Technical Council (CTC). On December 5th, 1984 the National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (LNRS) was formally created. At this time, four researchers were sent to Stanford University to design the project of a gun and the storage ring. They came back with a proposal for a 2 GeV energy machine, downgraded to 1.15 GeV.
LNRS was renamed Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS) in January, 1987. The Brazilian Synchrotron project had already started a year earlier, with 26 employees – physicists, engineers and technicians. They worked in a rented house in Campinas, Sao Paulo, and after a while in an industrial shed acquired by CNPq, says Marcelo Burgos Baummann, in Science in the Periphery: The Brazilian synchrotron light (Publisher UFJF, 1999). In 1990, the team moved to the campus where the synchrotron source was built.
