Photon Science 2020
Highlights and Annual Report
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Beschreibung
Dear Colleagues and Friends of DESY Photon Science,
The year 2020 started very promising with an extremely
well-attended DESY and European XFEL Users’ Meeting end
of January. More than 1300 participants from 28 countries
registered for this event. At that time, the spread of the
SARS-CoV-2 virus was considered to be a rather local
epidemic in China. However, this changed quickly. Soon
afterwards the ‘World Health Organization’ WHO classified
Covid-19 as a pandemic, that is still severely affecting our
lives and also the way we carry out research at large-scale
facilities. Not knowing how heavily the coronavirus might hit
Germany and other countries, and considering the uncertainties
on upcoming lockdown measures and related travel restrictions of user groups, DESY decided to shut down the
operation of its user facilties PETRA III and FLASH by mid
of March.
However, within a week, first requests for beamtime came
from DESY scientists, collaborators and users to contribute
to the fight against the pandemic. PETRA III was restarted
mainly for SARS-CoV-2-related research already at the end of
March. These experiments ranged from screening by X-ray
crystallography for possible inhibitors to slow down or even
to stop the reproduction of the virus after an infection (DESY,
Univ. Hamburg, BNITM, Fraunhofer, EMBL, and many more)
over high-resolution X-ray phase contrast tomography of lung
and heart tissue from patients deceased due to SARS-CoV-2
(Univ. Göttingen, Medical Hospital Hannover) to SAXS measurements
on the bio-physical properties of lipid nanoparticles
containing mRNA of the virus as candidates for possible
vaccines (Univ. Mainz, BioNTech GmbH, EMBL). A summary
of this research is compiled in the ‘Corona Special’ section
and in the EMBL article in this report. Regular operation of
PETRA III for users commenced beginning of May under very
strict safety measures.
At FLASH, the shutdown period due to the pandemic was
used to carry out an important, time consuming safety check
of the superconducting linear accelerator, and operation for
users restarted at the beginning of August. Of course, user
operation under the conditions of a pandemic is different
from what we were used to before. Besides strict safety rules
as wearing masks, providing negative Corona tests or even
quarantine, only few users were allowed to work at the experimental
stations at the same time in order to keep the number
of personal contacts low. Where possible, mail-in experiments
were carried out or users were participating in or controlling
the experiments remotely since travel restrictions did not
allow them to get on-site. This resulted in a heavy workload
for the beamline staff and was also stressful for many users
since a number of scheduled experiments had to be shifted
to next year. Despite all challenges, the lessons that we
learned during this year will help us in defining the requirements
for an increased fraction of mail-in and remote experiments
in the future for a more sustainable operation scheme.
European XFEL also went into a safety shutdown during
spring and resumed operation in summer. Significant progress
has been made in the implementation of the instrumentation
of the three major user consortia (SFX, HiBEF, hRIXS)
with DESY participation.
Despite the pandemic situation, the progress for planning the
upgrades of our large-scale photon science facilities was
hardly slowed down, even if many people were in home office
and nearly all meetings were organised as video conferences.
For both future upgrade projects, PETRA IV and FLASH2020+,
conceptual design reports were published by the end of 2019
and work on the detailed technical designs has started. Eventhough a series of scientific instruments workshops for
PETRA IV was organised as video conferences there was a
huge enthusiasm among the user community reflected in
almost 1400 registered participants in total.
In order to prepare a joint future strategy for a complementary
ensemble of photon sources in Germany, Helmholtz-
Zentrum Berlin (HZB), Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-
Rossendorf (HZDR) and DESY have finalised a ‘National
Photon Science Roadmap’ document.
Unfortunately, the pandemic situation also affected construction
work on-site. Therefore, the building for the Center for
X-ray and Nano Science (CXNS) including the DESY NanoLab
will get ready in spring 2021 with slight delay. In addition to
the already existing partners Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht
(HZG) and the Kiel University (CAU), the Hamburg University
of Technology (TUHH) and the Institut für Kristallzüchtung in
Berlin (IKZ) joint in as new partners into this scientific activity.
Furthermore, the proposed Center for Molecular Water
Science (CMWS) has been pushed forward with the wellattended
‘DESY Water Week’ forum before the lockdown.
A white paper on the CMWS science activities is close to
completion.
The year 2020 was exceptional due to the pandemic situation
both for research and in particular for the user operation at
our facilities. I would like to thank everyone who has helped
to ensure that we could continue to do science even under
these difficult conditions. Finally, I wish us all that the newly
approved vaccines will ease the situation and allow us to
return towards normal life during 2021.
Edgar Weckert
Director DESY Photon Science
Autor*in
Themen in »Photon Science 2020«
Annual Report Highlights Photon Science