SOLEIL ("Sun" in French) is a synchrotron facility near Paris, France. It performed its first acceleration of electrons on May 14, 2006. The name SOLEIL is a backronym for Source Optimisée de Lumière d’Énergie Intermédiaire du LURE (LURE optimised intermediary energy light source), LURE meaning Laboratoire pour l'Utilisation du Rayonnement Électromagnétique.

The facility is run by a civil corporation held by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), two French national research agencies. It is located in Saint-Aubin in the Essonne département, a south-western suburb of Paris, near Gif-sur-Yvette and Saclay, which host other facilities for nuclear and particle physics.

The facility is an associate member of the University of Paris-Saclay.

SOLEIL also hosts IPANEMA, the European research platform on ancient materials (archaeology, palaeontology, past environments and cultural heritage), a joint CNRS / French Ministry of Culture and Communication research unit.

SOLEIL covers fundamental research needs in physics, chemistry, material sciences, life sciences (notably in the crystallography of biological macromolecules), earth sciences, and atmospheric sciences. It offers the use of a wide range of spectroscopic methods from infrared to X-rays, and structural methods such as X-ray diffraction and scattering.

SOLEIL contains electrons travelling with an energy of 2.75 GeV around a 354 m circumference. It takes the electrons 1.2 μs to travel around this ring at almost the speed of light; 847,000 times per second.

According to Google Scholar, in 2024 this is the top 10 of most cited scientists of Synchrotron Soleil:

• John Bozek

  Citations: 23,755  
  Research Areas: X-ray physics, synchrotron radiation, XFEL, chemical physics, ultrafast X-ray

• Jose Avila

  Citations: 15,273  
  Research Areas: Not specified

• Amina Taleb Ibrahimi

  Citations: 12,628  
  Research Areas: Condensed matter physics, low-dimensional systems

• Timm Weitkamp

  Citations: 11,773  
  Research Areas: X-ray imaging, microtomography, X-ray microscopy, X-ray phase contrast imaging

• Laurent Nahon

  Citations: 10,754  
  Research Areas: Chirality, circular dichroism, molecular photoionization, VUV spectroscopy, polarimetry

• Andrea Zitolo

  Citations: 8,535  
  Research Areas: Physical chemistry, Material sciences, materials for energy and hydrogen

• Patrick Le Fèvre

  Citations: 8,187  
  Research Areas: Physics

• François Bertran

  Citations: 7,977  
  Research Areas: Physics

• Pavel Dudin

  Citations: 7,775  
  Research Areas: Band structure, materials science, topological insulators, graphene, superconductors

• Pierre Legrand

  Citations: 7,706  
  Research Areas: Structural virology, nucleic acid-protein interaction, crystallography, tomography, synchrotron

• Media related to Synchrotron Soleil at Wikimedia Commons
• Official website (in French)
• Official website (in English)
• LURE website (in French)
• Lightsources.org
• Official website of IPANEMA (in English)
• Official website of IPANEMA (in French)