The Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, commonly referred to by the abbreviation DESY, is a national research center in Germany. It operates particle accelerators used to investigate the structure of matter, and conducts a broad spectrum of inter-disciplinary scientific research in three main areas: particle and high energy physics; photon science, and the development, construction and operation of particle accelerators. Its name refers to its first project, an electron synchrotron. DESY is publicly financed by the Federal Republic of Germany, the States of Germany, and the German Research Foundation (DFG). DESY is a member of the Helmholtz Association and operates at sites in Hamburg and Zeuthen.
The International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment is a high energy physics experiment at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. The experiment is a recognized CERN experiment (RE11). MICE is designed to demonstrate ionization cooling of muons. This is a process whereby the emittance of a beam is reduced in order to reduce the beam size, so that more muons can be accelerated in smaller aperture accelerators and with fewer focussing magnets. This might enable the construction of high intensity muon accelerators, for example for use as a Neutrino Factory or Muon Collider.
A free-electron laser (FEL) is a light source producing extremely brilliant and short pulses of radiation. An FEL functions and behaves in many ways like a laser, but instead of using stimulated emission from atomic or molecular excitations, it employs relativistic electrons as a gain medium. Radiation is generated by a bunch of electrons passing through a magnetic structure. In an FEL, this radiation is further amplified as the radiation re-interacts with the electron bunch such that the electrons start to emit coherently, thus allowing an exponential increase in overall radiation intensity.
The High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, known as KEK, is a Japanese organization whose purpose is to operate the largest particle physics laboratory in Japan, situated in Tsukuba, Ibaraki prefecture. It was established in 1997. The term "KEK" is also used to refer to the laboratory itself, which employs approximately 695 employees. KEK's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics, material science, structural biology, radiation science, computing science, nuclear transmutation and so on. Numerous experiments have been constructed at KEK by the internal and international collaborations that have made use of them. Makoto Kobayashi, emeritus professor at KEK, is known globally for his work on CP-violation, and was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The Positron–Electron Tandem Ring Accelerator (PETRA) is one of the particle accelerators at the German national laboratory DESY in Hamburg, Germany. At the time of its construction, it was the biggest storage ring of its kind and still is DESY's second largest synchrotron after HERA. PETRA's original purpose was research in elementary particle physics. From 1978 to 1986, it was used to study electron–positron collisions with the four experiments JADE, MARK-J, PLUTO and TASSO. The discovery of the gluon, the carrier particle of the strong nuclear force, by the TASSO collaboration in 1979 is counted as one of the biggest successes. PETRA was able to accelerate electrons and positrons to 19 GeV.
ZEUS was a particle detector at the HERA particle accelerator at the German national laboratory DESY in Hamburg. It began taking data in 1992 and was operated until HERA was decommissioned in June 2007. The scientific collaboration behind ZEUS consisted of about 400 physicists and technicians from 56 institutes in 17 countries.
Accelerators and Lasers In Combined Experiments (ALICE), or Energy Recovery Linac Prototype (ERLP) is a 35MeV energy recovery linac test facility at Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, England. The project was originally conceived as a test bed for the 4th Generation Light Source (4GLS), and consists of:
The Swiss Light Source (SLS) is a synchrotron located at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland for producing electromagnetic radiation of high brightness. Planning started in 1991, the project was approved in 1997, and first light from the storage ring was seen at December 15, 2000. The experimental program started in June 2001 and it is used for research in materials science, biology and chemistry.
FLASH, acronym of Free Electron LASer in Hamburg, is a superconducting particle accelerator-based soft X-ray free-electron laser located at the German national laboratory DESY in Hamburg, Germany. It can generate very powerful, ultrashort pulses (~10−14 s) of coherent radiation in the energy range from 10 eV (electronvolt) to 300 eV. It started operation for external users in the year 2005 and is used for surface, molecular and atomic physics experiments. Intended applications are also the imaging of single biological complex molecules with time resolution.
The Berliner Elektronenspeicherring-Gesellschaft für Synchrotronstrahlung m. b. H., abbreviated BESSY, is a research establishment in the Adlershof district of Berlin. Founded on 5 March 1979, it currently operates one of Germany's 3rd generation synchrotron radiation facilities, BESSY II. Originally part of the Leibniz Association, BESSY now belongs to the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin.
SwissFEL is the X-ray free-electron laser at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), which was inaugurated in December 2016.
An energy recovery linac (ERL) provides a beam of electrons used to produce x-rays by synchrotron radiation. First proposed in 1965 the idea gained interest since the early 2000s.
The SPring-8 Angstrom Compact free electron LAser, referred to as SACLA, is an X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) in Harima Science Garden City, Japan, embedded in the SPring-8 accelerator and synchrotron complex. When it first came into operation 2011, it was the second XFEL in the world and the first in Japan.
The Helmholtz Institute Jena was founded as an outstation of the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung on June 25, 2009 and is located on the campus of the Friedrich Schiller University (FSU) in the city of Jena, Germany. Its purpose is to unite the research activities of the FSU in the fields of high intensity laser physics and x-ray spectroscopy with the expertise of the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung and Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in the fields of accelerator physics, laser physics and x-ray technology. The research profile of the Helmholtz Institute Jena is focused on the physics occurring at the border between conventional particle-acceleration technology and the fast-evolving field of laser-induced particle acceleration.. It is concerned with advancing these new laser-induced accelerator concepts, as well as with the production and investigation of intense photon and particle beams, including their interaction with matter. Therefore the main activities of the institute are emphasized on the development of high intensity lasers, new concepts for laser-driven particle acceleration, x-ray spectroscopy and strong-field quantum electrodynamics, as well as on the physics of hot dense plasmas. Apart from that the Helmholtz Institute Jena aims to contribute to the further development of the research facilities at the Helmholtz center GSI, especially the future project FAIR, and DESY with the free-electron laser (FEL) photon sources FLASH and XFEL . In cooperation with the FSU Jena a completely diode-pumped laser system of the high energy petawatt class (HEPW) with the POLARIS laser is realized in the building of the Helmholtz Institute Jena. First measurements are done since 2008. Due to the missing last amplifier stage the pulse strength of 1 PW couldn't be reached yet. The graduate school "Research School for Advanced Photon Science" (RS-APS) was established at the Helmholtz Institute Jena in July 2012. The RS-APS supports up to 25 PhD students and provides a structured graduation program in cooperation with facilities of the FSU Jena and the Helmholtz Graduate School for Hadron and Ion Research (HGS-HIRe).
A photoinjector is a type of source for intense electron beams which relies on the photoelectric effect. A laser pulse incident onto the cathode of a photoinjector drives electrons out of it, and into the accelerating field of the electron gun. In comparison with the widespread thermionic electron gun, photoinjectors produce electron beams of higher brightness, which means more particles packed into smaller volume of phase space. Photoinjectors serve as the main electron source for single-pass synchrotron light sources, such as free-electron lasers and for ultrafast electron diffraction setups. The first RF photoinjector was developed in 1985 at Los Alamos National Laboratory and used as the source for a free-electron-laser experiment. High-brightness electron beams produced by photoinjectors are used directly or indirectly to probe the molecular, atomic and nuclear structure of matter for fundamental research, as well as material characterization.
Gerhard Theodor Materlik is a German physicist and science manager. He has made significant contributions to X-ray physics, notably improvements in the real-world application of synchrotron radiation. He is a Professor of Facilities Science at the University College London since 2013.
Diffraction-limited storage rings (DLSR), or ultra-low emittance storage rings, are synchrotron light sources where the emittance of the electron-beam in the storage ring is smaller or comparable to the emittance of the x-ray photon beam they produce at the end of their insertion devices. These facilities operate in the soft to hard x-ray range (100eV—100keV) with extremely high brilliance (in the order of 1021—1022 photons/s/mm2/mrad2/0.1%BW)
Serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) is a form of X-ray crystallography developed for use at X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs). Single pulses at free-electron lasers are bright enough to generate resolvable Bragg diffraction from sub-micron crystals. However, these pulses also destroy the crystals, meaning that a full data set involves collecting diffraction from many crystals. This method of data collection is referred to as serial, referencing a row of crystals streaming across the X-ray beam, one at a time.
