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.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and located in Menlo Park, California. It is the site of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a 3.2 kilometer (2-mile) linear accelerator constructed in 1966 and shut down in the 2000s, which could accelerate electrons to energies of 50 GeV.
A synchrotron light source is a source of electromagnetic radiation (EM) usually produced by a storage ring, for scientific and technical purposes. First observed in synchrotrons, synchrotron light is now produced by storage rings and other specialized particle accelerators, typically accelerating electrons. Once the high-energy electron beam has been generated, it is directed into auxiliary components such as bending magnets and insertion devices in storage rings and free electron lasers. These supply the strong magnetic fields perpendicular to the beam which are needed to convert high energy electrons into photons.
Diamond Light Source is the UK's national synchrotron light source science facility located at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire. Its purpose is to produce intense beams of light whose special characteristics are useful in many areas of scientific research. In particular it can be used to investigate the structure and properties of a wide range of materials from proteins, and engineering components to conservation of archeological artifacts.
An insertion device (ID) is a component in modern synchrotron light sources, so called because they are "inserted" into accelerator tracks. They are periodic magnetic structures that stimulate highly brilliant, forward-directed synchrotron radiation emission by forcing a stored charged particle beam to perform wiggles, or undulations, as they pass through the device. This motion is caused by the Lorentz force, and it is from this oscillatory motion that we get the names for the two classes of device, which are known as wigglers and undulators. As well as creating a brighter light, some insertion devices enable tuning of the light so that different frequencies can be generated for different applications.
A synchrotron is a particular type of cyclic particle accelerator, descended from the cyclotron, in which the accelerating particle beam travels around a fixed closed-loop path. The magnetic field which bends the particle beam into its closed path increases with time during the accelerating process, being synchronized to the increasing kinetic energy of the particles. The synchrotron is one of the first accelerator concepts to enable the construction of large-scale facilities, since bending, beam focusing and acceleration can be separated into different components. The most powerful modern particle accelerators use versions of the synchrotron design. The largest synchrotron-type accelerator, also the largest particle accelerator in the world, is the 27-kilometre-circumference (17 mi) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, built in 2008 by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). It can accelerate beams of protons to an energy of 6.5 tera electronvolts (TeV or 1012 eV).
Electron scattering occurs when electrons are deviated from their original trajectory. This is due to the electrostatic forces within matter interaction or, if an external magnetic field is present, the electron may be deflected by the Lorentz force. This scattering typically happens with solids such as metals, semiconductors and insulators; and is a limiting factor in integrated circuits and transistors.
High-energy X-rays or HEX-rays are very hard X-rays, with typical energies of 80–1000 keV (1 MeV), about one order of magnitude higher than conventional X-rays used for X-ray crystallography. They are produced at modern synchrotron radiation sources such as the beamline ID15 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF). The main benefit is the deep penetration into matter which makes them a probe for thick samples in physics and materials science and permits an in-air sample environment and operation. Scattering angles are small and diffraction directed forward allows for simple detector setups.
ALBA is a third-generation synchrotron light source facility located in the Barcelona Synchrotron Park in Cerdanyola del Vallès near Barcelona, in Catalonia (Spain). It was constructed and is operated by CELLS, and co-financed by the Spanish central administration and regional Catalan Government.
ANSTO's Australian Synchrotron is a 3 GeV national synchrotron radiation facility located in Clayton, in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria, which opened in 2007.
X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES), also known as near edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS), is a type of absorption spectroscopy that indicates the features in the X-ray absorption spectra (XAS) of condensed matter due to the photoabsorption cross section for electronic transitions from an atomic core level to final states in the energy region of 50–100 eV above the selected atomic core level ionization energy, where the wavelength of the photoelectron is larger than the interatomic distance between the absorbing atom and its first neighbour atoms.
SPEAR was a collider at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. It began running in 1972, colliding electrons and positrons with an energy of 3 GeV. During the 1970s, experiments at the accelerator played a key role in particle physics research, including the discovery of the
J/ψ
meson, many charmonium states, and the discovery of the tau.
Joachim Stöhr is a physicist and professor emeritus of the Photon Science Department of Stanford University. His research has focused on the development of X-ray and synchrotron radiation techniques and their applications in different scientific fields with emphasis on surface science and magnetism. During his career he also held several scientific leadership positions, such as the director of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) and he was the founding director of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), the world's first x-ray free electron laser.
The Synchrotron Radiation Center (SRC), located in Stoughton, Wisconsin and operated by the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was a national synchrotron light source research facility, operating the Aladdin storage ring. From 1968 to 1987 SRC was the home of Tantalus, the first storage ring dedicated to the production of synchrotron radiation.
MAX IV is a next-generation synchrotron radiation facility in Lund, Sweden. Its design and planning has been carried out within the Swedish national laboratory, MAX-lab, which up until 2015 operated three accelerators for synchrotron radiation research: MAX I, MAX II and MAX III. MAX-lab supported about 1000 users from over 30 countries annually. The facility operated 14 beamlines with a total of 19 independent experimental stations, supporting a wide range of experimental techniques such as macromolecular crystallography, electron spectroscopy, nanolithography and production of tagged photons for photo-nuclear experiments. The facility closed on 13 December 2015 in preparation for MAX IV.
Keith O. Hodgson is a Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and formerly director of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource.
The National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York is a national user research facility funded primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science. NSLS-II is one of the world's most advanced synchrotron light sources, designed to produce x-rays 10,000 times brighter than BNL's original light source, the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS). NSLS-II supports basic and applied research in energy security, advanced materials synthesis and manufacturing, environment, and human health.
Solaris is the only synchrotron in Central-Eastern part of Europe, build in Poland in 2015, under the auspices of the Jagiellonian University. It is located on the Campus of the 600th Anniversary of the Jagiellonian University Revival, in the southern part of Krakow. It is the central facility of the National Center of Synchrotron Radiation SOLARIS.
X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) is a form of X-ray spectroscopy in which the X-ray line spectra are measured with a spectral resolution sufficient to analyze the impact of the chemical environment on the X-ray line energy and on branching ratios. This is done by exciting electrons out of their shell and then watching the emitted photons of the recombinating electrons.
Sakura Pascarelli is an Italian physicist and the scientific director at the European XFEL. Her research focuses on the study on matter at extreme conditions of pressure, temperature and magnetic fields, in particular using X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and X-ray Magnetic Linear and Circular Dichroism (XMCD).
