The European XFEL is located mainly in underground tunnels which can be accessed at three different sites. The 3.4 km-long facility runs from the DESY campus in Hamburg to the town of Schenefeld in Schleswig-Holstein (Germany). At the research campus in Schenefeld, teams of scientists from all over the world carry out experiments using X-ray flashes. To construct and operate the European XFEL, international partners agreed on the foundation of an independent research organization – the European XFEL GmbH. At present, 12 countries are participating in the project: Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The European XFEL GmbH cooperates closely with the research center DESY and other organizations worldwide. Construction started in early 2009; user operation began in September 2017.

The European XFEL generates ultrashort X-ray flashes—27 000 times per second and with a brilliance that is a billion times higher than that of the best conventional X-ray radiation sources

The world's largest X-ray laser is opening up completely new research opportunities for scientists and industrial users.

Currently, six instruments are operating and accepting proposals for beamtime allocation.

FERMI (acronym for Free Electron laser Radiation for Multidisciplinary Investigations) is the seeded free electron laser (FEL) facility in operation for external users next to the third-generation synchrotron radiation facility Elettra. Unique among the FEL sources currently operating in the ultraviolet and soft x-ray range worldwide, FERMI has been developed to provide fully coherent ultrashort (10-100 femtosecond) pulses with a peak brightness ten billion times higher than that made available by third-generation light sources. FERMI opens unique opportunities for exploring the structure and transient states of condensed matter, soft matter and low-density matter using a variety of diffraction, scattering and spectroscopy techniques.

SwissFEL is the Switzerland's X-ray free-electron laser at the Paul Scherrer Institute (Villigen). SwissFEL is a hard Xray FEL witha minimun wavelength of 0.1 nm and a pulse duration of 20 fs and below. SwissFEL was inaugurated on Dec 5th  2016. Two SASE FEL lines are driven by the linac: a hard Xray FEL named Aramis and a soft X-ray line named Athos