NA61/SHINE (SPS Heavy Ion and Neutrino Experiment) is a multi-purpose experimental facility to study hadron production in hadron-proton, hadron-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron. It recorded the first physics data with hadron beams in 2009 and with ion beams (secondary 7 Be beams) in 2011.NA61/SHINE has greatly profited from the long development of the CERN proton and ion sources and the accelerator chain as well as the H2 beamline of the CERN North Area. The latter has recently been modified to also serve as a fragment separator as needed to produce the Be beams for NA61/SHINE. Numerous components of the NA61/SHINE set-up were inherited from its predecessors, in particular, the last one, the NA49 experiment. Important new detectors and upgrades of the legacy equipment were introduced by the NA61/SHINE Collaboration.This paper describes the state of the NA61/SHINE facility -the beams and the detector system -before the CERN Long Shutdown I, which started in March 2013.

We discuss the possibility of creating novel research tools by producing and storing highly relativistic beams of highly ionised atoms in the CERN accelerator complex, and by exciting their atomic degrees of freedom with lasers to produce high-energy photon beams. Intensity of such photon beams would be by several orders of magnitude higher than offered by the presently operating light sources, in the particularly interesting γ-ray energy domain of 0.1-400 MeV. In this energy range, the high-intensity photon beams can be used to produce secondary beams of polarised electrons, polarised positrons, polarised muons, neutrinos, neutrons and radioactive ions. New research opportunities in a wide domain of fundamental and applied physics can be opened by the Gamma Factory scientific programme based on the above primary and secondary beams.

With the progress made in 2015, the beams produced by the CERN Proton Synchrotron using multiturn extraction (MTE) have been delivered to the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) for the fixed-target physics run. Operation successfully started in the second half of September 2015 and continued until the end of the proton physics program by mid November. In this paper the overall performance and beam quality is discussed in detail considering the complete chain of accelerators, from the PS-Booster to the SPS. Moreover, a thorough comparison of the global performance of the MTE scheme against the previously used technique, the so-called continuous transfer (CT), is also carried out.

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The beam optics of the PS-SPS transfer line at CERN has been studied and optimised for a variety of beams. Betatron and dispersion matching has been performed for the fixedtarget proton and ion beams, as well as for the future LHC proton beam. The techniques applied to the measurement of the optical parameters in the transfer line are discussed and experimental results are presented.