An aerial drone photo taken on Sept. 16, 2026 shows the Hefei Advanced Light Facility (HALF) under construction in Hefei, east China's Anhui Province. (Xinhua/Zhou Mu)

　　HEFEI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The linear accelerator of the Hefei Advanced Light Facility (HALF) successfully generated and delivered an electron beam on Sunday, marking a key step forward in the construction of the world's most advanced fourth-generation synchrotron radiation facility in the low-energy range.

　　Located in Hefei, capital city of east China's Anhui Province, the institution is a fourth-generation synchrotron radiation facility operating at a designed energy of 2.2 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) and based on diffraction-limited storage ring technology. It is also a major national science and technology infrastructure project in China.

　　By generating highly intense and coherent light, the facility will serve as a "super microscope" for scientists to probe the microscopic structure of matter.

　　Compared with third-generation synchrotron radiation sources, HALF is expected to produce soft X-rays with more than 100 times higher brightness and coherence. It will enable the development of experimental techniques with greater precision and sensitivity in the spatial, temporal and energy domains, providing an important research platform for studying microscopic particle behavior, the structure of light elements, and changes in the electronic, chemical and spin states of materials.