Status report of the ESRF

The ESRF is now in full routine operation with nearly 30 beamlines taking X-ray beam and opened to external users. The performances of the machine have been steadily improved during the last year: increase of the intensity up to 200 mA, reduction of the vertical emittance, lowering of the vertical β in the straight sections, reduction of the undulator minimum gap, all of these resulting in a significant gain on the achieved photon brilliance. In parallel to this net improvement, the routine operating standards have been largely improved with a mean time between failures larger than 40 hours and an availability better than 94% over the 5000 hours of beam scheduled in 1996. In addition, the versatility of the machine has been enlarged with an increasing number of operating modes so as to better satisfy the different users´ requirements (multibunch mode, single bunch mode, 16 bunch mode and various hybrid modes)