DESY in 2012: A year of light and dust

While 2011 will go down in history as the construction year at DESY, there might even be more of it in 2012. The construction activities will spread across the entire DESY campus and will go from mere digging in the dirt to high-tech installations.

 

Location of the DORIS III and PETRA III storage rings, the two free-electron laser FLASH, and the planned position of the European XFEL accelerator tunnel. Copyright: DESY 2010.

The 2-kilometre-long accelerator tunnel of the European XFEL and the injector building on the DESY campus are ready, and will be technically equipped and prepared for the accelerator installation. The first accelerator modules will not be put in place before 2013, but a new module test hall will soon become operational and is expecting its first pre-series cavities and modules.

FLASH II is another impressive construction site on the DESY premises. The area around FLASH, the free-electron laser for soft X-rays, looks quite like a sandbox at the moment. A second beamline for photons and a second experimental hall to satisfy the high demand of scientific users will be erected next year.

With the construction of two extension halls for PETRA III, the super-brilliant X-ray light source, DESY will offer additional, novel research possibilities with dedicated experiments and beamlines for materials sciences, structural biology and life sciences. This has attracted international cooperation partners from Sweden, Russia and India.

After phasing out the synchrotron radiation operation, the DORIS storage ring will return for a last time to particle physics with a dedicated run at the end of the year for the OLYMPUS experiment. This will involve colliding electrons and positrons with a gas target to measure the two-photon contributions to elastic electron-proton scattering.

2012 also marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery of X-ray diffraction by Max von Laue, who demonstrated unambiguously the wave character of X-rays and the lattice structure of crystals. Following tradition of the X-ray experiments using our cutting-edge light factories, DESY will celebrate this anniversary with a festive Max von Laue Symposium in late summer 2012.

So let’s accelerate together into a happy new year 2012!

by Frank Lehner