Recent results of the SPARC project

The SPARC project foresees the realization of a high brightness photo-injector to produce a 150-200 MeV electron beam to drive 500 nm FEL experiments in various configurations, a Thomson backscattering source and a plasma accelerator experiment (these last two ones jointly with the project PLASMONX). The SPARC photoinjector is also the test facility for the recently approved VUV FEL project named SPARX. The second stage of the commissioning, that is currently underway, foresees a detailed analysis of the beam matching with the linac in order to confirm the theoretically prediction of emittance compensation based on the \u201cinvariant envelope\u201d matching and the demonstration of the \u201cvelocity bunching\u201d technique in the linac. SASE, SEEDING and Single Spike experiments are foreseen by the end of the current year. In this contribution we report the experimental results obtained so far and the scientific program for the near future