Free Electron Laser (FEL) are the high power lasers which were the prime candidates to produce the intense laser beams intended to destroy attacking balistic missiles in the "star wars" program. This veteran of the cold war has made a vocational conversion in the post cold war era. Presently it is being used mostly as a very flexible tuneable source of coherent radiation for scientific, technological and medical research which is conducted in big user facilities. This application does not really take full advantage of the high operating power capabilities of the device.

Quite natural applications for FEL lay in the industrial and energy related areas. At the present time there are more than 50 FEL facilities in operation and development all over the world - primarily in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

The Israeli FEL is one out of few projects in the world which are based on electrostatic accelerators. Only such devices can operate with a continuous wave (cw) or in a quasi-cw (long pulse) mode. All other FELs, are based on pulsed accelerators and can produce, therefore, only a pulsed waveform. Electrostatic Accelerator FELs (EA-FEL) are also characterized by potential for high average power, high energy conversion efficiency and high spectral purity (narrow linewidth).

The eccelerator development work and the subsequent FEL experiment were funded by the Israeli Ministry of Science, Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure and Ministry of Defence, the Israel Academy of Science, U.S.-Israel B.S.F. and the Meyer Foundation.

The project is carried out by a consortium of 3 institutes: Tel-Aviv University, RAFAEL and Nuclear Research Center Negev.