I am happy to see that the first issue of Activity Report of Indus-1 is being brought out. I can not but recall the report of the National Committee on Advanced High Energy Accelerator Facility which was submitted more than two decades ago in December 1982. This committee, chaired by Dr. P.K. Iyengar, was constituted by Secretary, DAE, to recommend a long-term programme to construct major accelerator facilities in India. After long deliberations the committee rightly decided that the first major accelerator facility in India should be a Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS).

The financial sanction for Indus-1 was finally issued in March 1987. However, at that time, CAT had no infrastructure even to take up some smaller projects. It took several years to build the infrastructure and start in real earnest the work on construction of the three accelerators of Indus-1 namely the microtron, booster synchrotron and the storage ring Indus-1. For example, enough power to test just one magnet for booster synchrotron was available only by 1992. After that the progress was rapid and the microtron was commissioned in March 1994, the booster synchrotron in September 1995 and Indus-1 in November 1999. It is important to remember that while developing Indus-1, all the technologies for constructing such accelerators were developed in-house. For example, all the Ultra High Vacuum systems including Sputter Ion Pumps and Titanium Sublimation Pumps were made in-house. All the magnets and their power supplies were designed, fabricated and characterized at CAT. The RF systems including RF cavities were also designed, fabricated, characterized and commissioned in-house.

Indus-1 is a national facility and we ececpt scientists from national laboratories as well as academic institutions to use this facility. At present, five beamlines are planned on Indus-1 of which the first two – one set up by Inter-university Centre for Electron spectroscopy and the other set up by CAT for VUV soft x-ray reflectivity measurements – were commissioned in November 2000. Since then, the remaining beamlines set up by Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) one for angle-resolved photo-electron spectroscopy, one for high resolution spectroscopy and one for general purpose experiments in VUV have been commissioned in a phased manner.

The Synchrotorn Radiation Source is a unique source of radiation expanding from far infrared to x-ray, in case of Indus-1 soft x-ray. The synchrotron radiation is tunable, is emitted in narrow pulses of a few picoseconds duration and is polarized. These properties can be used with great advantage in many experiments. The Indian scientific community must come forward to make use of this unique source of light.

I am happy that several studies have been carried out using the beamlines on Indus-1 which have already been published in reputed journals. The first activity report reviews the Indus-1 machine as well as beamlines and presents the studies carried out using beamlines on Indus-1. I hope that this report will inspire many more scientists to come forward and use Indus-1.