IR FEL reached 710 watts last month (March 11), the JLab FEL produced 710 watts of cw laser light at 4.9 mm. This achievement increments previous records of 550 watts obtained in February and 300 watts obtained last year. The FEL Commissioning team is working towards pushing the FEL up to its design goal of 1 kilowatt.

As the FEL team is commissioning the FEL, parallel activities are on-going with the commissioning of the FEL user labs. FEL User Lab 1 was certified for delivery of FEL light in March and shortly thereafter, the FEL user "Test Experiments" were begun. The tests were chosen to help the FEL team develop user lab procedures. One test on laser ablation was performed with colleagues from the NPS and a second test on laser-modified reflectivity was performed with colleagues from ODU.

The next FEL Users Meeting, the 1999 LPC Workshop, will be held at Jefferson Lab on June 17-18. Please hold these dates. The first announcement will be distributed shortly on the LPC Briefs e-mail list and posted on the web (http://www.jlab.org/intralab/calendar/wkshp.html?news).

Several members of JLab FEL User Community gave reports to the DOE-BES advisory committee on next generation light source development which met in Gaithersburg, MD on Jan 19-21. The committee's report is available on the web at http://www.er.doe.gov/production/bes/bes.html (look under Advisory Committee on the left hand panel and then under BESAC Publications).