Abstract
Synchrotron radiation is intense electromagnetic radiation with a continuous spectral distribution emitted by high-energy electron (or positron) synchrotrons or storage rings in the visible, vacuum ultraviolet and X-ray regions. For a long time only an unwanted but inevitable by-product of ring accelerators in elementary particle research, synchrotron radiation is now becoming a most widely used tool in atomic, molecular and solid-state spectroscopy, surface physics, structural research on solids, soft X-ray microscopy, lithography. It is not yet clear how large the field of applications really is nor which line of research will prove to be the most fruitful one in the long run.