A Project for a Compton Photon Source with an Energy up to 2500 MeV at the SKIF Synchrotron Radiation Facility

In this paper, we describe the project of a photon source with energies up to 2500 MeV at the SKIF synchrotron radiation facility (under construction in Novosibirsk). It is intended for experiments on photonuclear reactions, nonlinear QED, EM detector calibration and other applications. A polarized photon beam with a flux of 10 6 –10 8 Hz (in full spectrum) is produced using Compton backscattering (or inverse scattering) of IR, visible, and UV laser radiation, as well as the UV band of its own synchrotron radiation, on the SKIF electron beam (15 kHz). Spectrum monochromatization with collimators or/and tagging system by recoil electrons is possible. The discrepancy between experimental and theoretical photofission cross sections of actinide nuclei in a photon energy range of hundreds of MeV has been known since the 1980s, so it is proposed to study these cross sections in the first series of experiments.