Akira Kira Director SPring-8 / JASRI 3 Four years have passed since the SPring-8’s beam was first made available to the users. This volume of Research Frontiers collects the highlights of the results obtained using SPring-8 during its fourth year, and also describes recent status of the facilities. I hope that this publication would be informative to those currently working on sciences concerned with synchrotron radiation as well as would be instructive to scientists who have not been familiar with synchrotron radiation. Classification in the highlight reports has been changed so that it is friendly to scientists who ar e in te re st ed in bu t ar e no t an ex pe rt in sy nc hr ot ro n ra di at io n. Th e de ta il ed de sc ri pt io n of th e facilities, which used to be given in our separate publication, the SPring-8 Annual Report, has been moved to this publication as a result of the reorganization of our publications. The users of SPring-8 are classified to three categories: public users, contract beamline owners and facility owners (JAERI and RIKEN). This publication covers the activities of the users in all categories . As for the public use, fifty-five per cent of the total beam time for this period was allocated to this category, and 855 experiments were actually carried out, selected from a total of 1084 proposals. I was appointed the Director General of Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory at SPring-8 in August 2001. I think that SPring-8 is still in a transient from construction to application. Many users have enjoyed the superb quality of the beam of SPring-8. But people concerned with the accelerators and beamlines believe that the machine must be much more potential for new applications than it is utilized now. Those who supported the construction of SPring-8 are now watching how this excellent facility contributes to the society. I would like to invite new challengers to join us to explore latent possibilities of SPring-8.
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