Joint European XFEL and DESY Photon Science Users' Meeting 2013

The European XFEL and DESY Photon Science Annual Users' Meeting 2013 set a new record: more than 800 participants, scientists, staff, and students from 25 countries registered for this event. The three-day meeting took place from January 23 to 25, 2013, at DESY in Hamburg (Germany). There was great interest in the latest news on the construction of the European XFEL and on the extension projects at PETRA III and FLASH, and the participants had plenty of opportunities to catch up on recent free-electron laser (FEL) and synchrotron light source developments ranging from THz to hard X-rays applications.     

Ultrafast X-ray science at the advanced light source

On May 19, 2004, 250 guests from all over the world joined the DESY research center to celebrate 40 years of research with synchrotron radiation at DESY in Hamburg. “The first measurements with the light beam from the DESY ring accelerator started in 1964. DESY was one of the seed laboratories in which the worldwide success story of research with synchrotron radiation began,” Albrecht Wagner, chairman of the DESY Board of Directors, explained in his welcoming address. “Today, more than 1,900 scientists from 31 countries come to DESY every year to carry out experiments with synchrotron radiation.”

Forty years ago, synchrotron radiation at DESY started from scratch. At the beginning of the 1960s, the radiation generated by the electrons in the bending magnets of their new 6 GeV electron synchrotron was regarded by DESY particle physicists as an unwanted, disruptive effect.     

How it All Started at DESY in 1964

To put it bluntly, synchrotrons and storage rings were originally not intended to become light sources for synchrotron radiation (SR). If particle physicists had not driven this development for their own needs, we would not yet have these sources available at their present level of sophistication. In 1964, when the then-6 GeV synchrotron DESY at the newly founded Hamburg institution of the same name started operating, SR was considered at best a nuisance. Accelerating an electron to 6 GeV was accompanied by a loss of 9.35 GeV on its way due to this radiation, and later, at 7.5 GeV, the loss amounted to 22.8 GeV. How could it then happen that today all of the DESY storage rings and linear accelerators are devoted to SR?     

ESRF 11th users' meeting and workshops

More than 90 participants from Europe, the US and Japan gathered from April 27 to 29, 2005, in Zeuthen, near Berlin, to hold a lively international meeting on time-resolved soft X-ray science. The meeting continued the series of preceding workshops held in 2002 in Napa (California, USA) and in 2003 in Montreux (Switzerland). It was organized by the three synchrotron radiation sources BESSY (Berlin, Germany), the Swiss Light Source SLS (Villigen) and the French synchrotron radiation source SOLEIL (Orsay).

The aim of the workshop was to bring together the existing ultrafast laser community and the emerging ultrafast X-ray community in order to discuss recent scientific highlights from both fields and to outline new directions for the application of ultrafast X-rays.     

A high resolution spectrometer using nuclear Bragg diffraction

A high resolution spectrometer for synchrotron radiation using nuclear Bragg diffraction has been constructed at a DORIS beamline (DESY, Hamburg). This spectrometer provides a γ-ray beam for hyperfine spectroscopy and for other application which need high resolution in energy and/or time.     

Joint European XFEL and DESY Photon Science Users' Meeting 2015

The European XFEL and DESY Photon Science Users' Meeting 2015 broke the attendance record of the previous year. In total, more than 800 scientists from around the world came to Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany, to participate in this three-day event, which took place on January 28–30, 2015. In particular, the latest news about the construction of the European XFEL facility as well as the extension projects at DESY's synchrotron source PETRA III and the Free-Electron Laser FLASH attracted a lot of interest.     

Permanent magnet wigglers for reducing the emittance of the Petra III synchrotron radiation source

The Petra III synchrotron radiation source was developed based on the Petra-II 6-GeV electron accelerator (DESY). After installing the system for radiation damping, the horizontal emittance of the electron beam of Petra III decreased from 5 nm rad to 1 nm rad, which is a record parameter for this class of installations. The system of radiation damping includes 20 permanent magnet wigglers installed in two straight sections, 50 m each. The total radiation power of the wigglers reaches 800 kW. The wigglers used in the radiation damping system of Petra III were developed in collaboration with DESY (Hamburg) and fabricated by the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics. The wiggler length is 4.04 m, the gap between the poles is 24 mm, the maximum magnetic field is B = 1.52?1.56 T, and the period is λ = 20 cm. This paper describes the design features of the permanent magnet wigglers and the methods and results of adjustment of the wiggler operating parameters.     

同步辐射真空紫外(VUV)区中的团簇物理

本文概述了同步辐射在团簇物理研究中的应用,讨论主要集中在真空紫外(VUV)区。重点说明其实验方法、研究进展状况和实验设计的一般考虑;并选择介绍德国DESY的团簇物理实验站CLULU;最后,对未来的发展方向提出作者的一些观点。     

Measurements of the operating-time variation of the spectral radiance of deuterium lamps

For the calibration of radiometric transfer standards by means of electron synchrotron radiation an apparatus has been developed which is in service at DESY, Hamburg. The equipment is used to calibrate commercial deuterium lamps (165 nm to 340 nm). The uncertainty of the “absolute” spectral radiance is ± 4%, whereas that of the relative spectral radiance is ± 2%.     

PETRA IV Workshop on Research with High-Energy X-rays at Ultra-Low Emittance Sources

Recent advances in storage ring technology pioneered by MAX IV (Sweden) allow synchrotron radiation sources to achieve significantly smaller emittances than those currently in operation. This new, multi-bend achromat technology can thus boost spectral brightness, enabling unprecedented experimental possibilities. The high-energy synchrotron radiation facilities ESRF (France), SPring-8 (Japan), and APS (USA) have settled upgrade plans to improve their storage ring emittance by up to two orders of magnitude at 6 GeV electron energy. PETRA III at DESY has the largest circumference with 2.3 km. As the emittance scales favorably with the storage ring size, an upgrade of PETRA III offers the unique potential to reach a diffraction limit up to X-ray energies of 10 keV. Operating at 6 GeV with an emittance of 10 pmrad, this PETRA IV facility would pave the way for new experimental opportunities, especially for those using high photon energies.     

Measurements of electron energy losses and VUV-reflectivity of anthracene single crystals

Anisotropic behaviour of the electron energy loss spectra is discussed in terms of the oriented gas model. These measurements are compared with electron energy loss spectra in the vapour phase and normal incidence VUV-reflectivity from the (ab) plane for 2 directions of polarization. The VUV measurements were made at DESY using synchrotron radiation.     

Meeting Reports: 2005 Annual Meeting of JSSRR (Japanese Society for Synchrotron Radiation Research)

The 18th Annual Meeting and General Assembly of the Japanese Society for Synchrotron Radiation Research (JSSRR) and the joint symposium of synchrotron radiation facility user's society groups were held at Sun-Messe Tosu Conference Hall in Tosu City, Japan, from January 7 to 9, 2005. The meeting was attended by 607 people and included 6 symposiums, 96 oral presentations, and 356 poster presentations covering all aspects of synchrotron radiation research and technology. The meeting also included 49 industrial exhibitions.

The six symposiums were on “Recent progress on soft X-ray optical elements,” “Now and the future on SR-XRF analysis for biological and environmental sciences,” “Recent development of THz Coherent Synchrotron Radiation,” “Super high-resolution protein structure analysis,” “Frontlines of Bio-Nano-microspectroscopy by UV-SX high brilliance SR,” and “The role of synchrotron radiation in the future of science: groundbreaking SR utilization for research on excited states”.     

Personal View: Synchrotron Radiation Instrumentation: A Personal Experience

The scope of this two-day meeting (held June 25–26, 2007), organized by the French MELUSYN (Medicine and Synchrotron Light) work group at the new synchrotron radiation facility SOLEIL (Saint-Aubin, France), was to create a timely forum for multi-disciplinary discussions on modern radiation biology. The meeting brought together physicists of diluted and condensed matter, chemists, biochemists, biologists, as well as physicians having a common interest in using synchrotron radiation in the UV, VUV, soft and hard X-ray ranges and the related techniques in order to explore at molecular, cellular or tissular levels various aspects of radiation effects on living systems and the medical consequences for radiotherapy.     

XAFS16 at KIT: Five Days of Cutting-Edge X-ray Science in Karlsruhe

The sixteenth international conference on X-ray Absorption Fine Structure, XAFS16, was held August 23–28, 2015, at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. Since the first such meeting in 1981, the XAFS conference series has become the foremost international meeting covering developments and applications in X-ray absorption spectroscopy. Jointly organized by KIT, DESY (Hamburg), HZB (Berlin), and the European XFEL (Hamburg), under the auspices of the International X-ray Absorption Society (IXAS), the XAFS16 conference hosted over 550 participants (including more than 160 young scientists) from 37 different countries, establishing a new record for the number of participants. The local organization was provided by the KIT institutes INE, IKFT, and ITCP and the ANKA synchrotron facility, with Jan-Dierk Grunwaldt leading the local organizing committee.     

Memorable Years for Synchrotron Radiation at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk

In the early 1970s, the Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP) in Novosibirsk was a unique place in the world of accelerator physics. There were three operational electron-positron storage rings at the institution. All together, they covered beam operational energies from 200 MeV up to 2.2 GeV. It was not a big surprise for the developers of these state-of-the-art machines when the first users of synchrotron radiation showed up at the doorsteps of the Institute of Nuclear Physics, eager to take advantage of such unique radiation sources. And how very unique they were! Compared with several already relatively well-established operational synchrotrons around the world, such as DESY in Hamburg, NINA in Darsbury, and three synchrotrons in the Soviet Union—one at the Physical Institute in Pakhra, another at the Tomsk Polytechnical Institute, and a third at the Erevan Physical Institute—the storage ring sources provided much more stable and brighter radiation beams. Several storage rings built at that time in locations such as Japan, the US, and France were also on the verge of becoming available for synchrotron radiation users.     

Workshop on in‐situ studies of materials processing

More than eighty scientists from over ten different countries in Europe and America descended on Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire to participate in the International Workshop on X-ray Spectroscopy of Magnetic Solids on June 10–21, 2010. The XRMS meetings have demonstrated to be a fruitful forum for informal discussion of recent results and future projects of synchrotron-radiation-based research on magnetism and also serve for the formation of new collaborations. The meetings are organized in sessions dedicated to specific scientific topics and experimental techniques. The absence of parallel sessions allows all the participants to take part in the discussion and to have a comprehensive view of the latest achievements and of the envisioned developments in the field. The previous meeting in the series was held last year at the synchrotron Soleil in St Aubin near Paris. The emerging new opportunities for magnetic spectroscopy, such as offered by the beamline for advanced dichroism experiments (BLADE), with its three intertwined assets of polarization, coherence, and time resolution, made it timely for the international community to convene at Diamond.     

Meeting Report: Soft-X-ray Photon-in and Photon-out Spectroscopy: New Frontier

Immediately before Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died in 1832, he asked for “more light, open the (window) shutters!” The desire for “more light, open the (beam) shutters!” accompanied me from 1962 on during all my professional life, although the first opening of our beam shutter at the 6 GeV-Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg in 1965 ended in a catastrophe: instead of flooding us with synchrotron light, we were flooding the accelerator completely with air. This was long before 1987, when Synchrotron Radiation News came to life, but a personal view on the development of synchrotron radiation, which the editors of SRN asked me to give, cannot avoid looking back into history, where it all came from.     

Photon Sources at DESY

During the past 10 years, photon science activities at DESY in Hamburg, Germany, have expanded significantly and this development is expected to continue in the coming years. The soft X-ray free-electron laser (FEL) FLASH has been in user operation for over 10 years and the high-brilliance hard X-ray synchrotron radiation source PETRA III started serving the user community five years ago. Access to both light sources has since been highly demanded by scientists not only from Germany and Europe, but from all over the world. The request for beamtime far exceeded the capacity of available experimental infrastructure at both facilities and, for this reason, it was necessary to add further beamlines and also to broaden the portfolio of techniques. Therefore, new facilities have recently been built to almost double the existing capacity for user beamtime at both sources (Figure 1).     

BioCD-2008: Synchrotron Radiation Circular Dichroism Spectroscopy of Proteins and Other Biomolecules

A weeklong workshop focusing on circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy using both conventional and synchrotron sources (SRCD) was presented at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory from June 23–27, 2008.     

Diamond X‐ray beam‐position monitoring using signal readout at the synchrotron radiofrequency

Single‐crystal diamond is a material with great potential for the fabrication of X‐ray photon beam‐position monitors with submicrometre spatial resolution. Low X‐ray absorption combined with radiation hardness and excellent thermal‐mechanical properties make possible beam‐transmissive diamond devices for monitoring synchrotron and free‐electron laser X‐ray beams. Tests were made using a white bending‐magnet synchrotron X‐ray beam at DESY to investigate the performance of a position‐sensitive diamond device using radiofrequency readout electronics. The device uniformity and position response were measured in a 25 µm collimated X‐ray beam with an I‐Tech Libera `Brilliance' system. This readout system was designed for position measurement and feedback control of the electron beam in the synchrotron storage ring, but, as shown here, it can also be used for accurate position readout of a quadrant‐electrode single‐crystal diamond sensor. The centre‐of‐gravity position of the F4 X‐ray beam at the DORIS III synchrotron was measured with the diamond signal output digitally sampled at a rate of 130 Msample s^?1 by the Brilliance system. Narrow‐band filtering and digital averaging of the position signals resulted in a measured position noise below 50 nm (r.m.s.) for a 10 Hz bandwidth.