Superbend upgrade at the Advanced Light Source

At the ALS there had been an increasing demand for additional high brightness hard x-ray beamlines in the 7 to 40 keV range. In response to that demand, the ALS storage ring was modified in August 2001. Three 1.3 tesla normal conducting bending magnets were removed and replaced with three 5 Tesla superconducting magnets (Superbends). The radiation produced by these Superbends is an order of magnitude higher in photon brightness and flux at 12 keV than that of the 1.3 Tesla bends, making them excellent sources of hard x-rays for protein crystallography and other hard x-ray applications. At the same time the Superbends do not compromise the performance of the facility in the UV and soft x-ray regions of the spectrum. The Superbend will eventually feed 12 new beam lines greatly enhancing the facility´s capacity in the hard x-ray region. The Superbend project is the biggest upgrade to the ALS storage ring since it was commissioned in 1993. In this paper we present a history of the project, as well as the installation, commissioning, and resulting performance of the ALS with Superbends.