New Scientific Opportunities at the European Synchrotron Radiation ...

European Synchrotron Radiation Facility Long-Term Strategy 7 July 2006
1. Introduction
New Scientific Opportunities
at the
European Synchrotron Radiation Facility
The ESRF’s 6 GeV storage-ring light source, built in the early nineties, is the first
insertion device based (“third generation”) synchrotron radiation (SR) source. The
ESRF has been extremely successful, in terms of both technical innovation and a
very large volume of new and exciting science. With some 5500 scientific user visits
each year, resulting in more than 1100 refereed publications, the ESRF is recognised
as one of the world’s most innovative and productive synchrotron light sources. This
success is also measured by requests for beamtime from the community of users of
the ESRF, consistently exceeding the available beamtime by a large factor. Inspired
by the success of the ESRF model, a significant number of ESRF member countries
have decided to construct new third generation national SR sources (Soleil in France,
Petra III in Germany, Diamond in the U.K. and Alba in Spain).
An essential element for the ESRF’s success has been the ambitious refurbishment
programme that has allowed science-driven technical innovation to be advanced in
crucial areas such as X-ray optics, detectors, sample environment, control systems
and accelerator physics. This programme is planned on the basis of a Medium-Term
Scientific Programme (MTSP), a scientific road-map covering 5 years which is
updated annually, and which provides the scientific justification for the ESRF’s
Medium Term Financial Estimates.
The longer term upgrade programme discussed here builds on the achievements of
the ESRF MTSP with the aim of ensuring to the ESRF a leading scientific position
over the next 10 to 20 years. New and refurbished beamlines are proposed to
answer new scientific needs, underpinned by a longer term programme to maintain
and refurbish the accelerator complex at the heart of the ESRF’s activities. Advances
in fields such as X-ray optics, detectors and accelerator physics, many of which
originated at the ESRF, now allow this ambitious renewal programme covering all
aspects of the ESRF’s activities. The performance of the beamlines will be enhanced
by several orders of magnitude. New scientific areas will be addressed with new
highly specialised nano-focus beamlines, with even brighter “hard” X-ray beams, and
by renewing beamline components such as detectors, optics, sample environments
and sample positioning. Special attention will be paid to the development of
advanced imaging techniques and to their combination with X-ray scattering and
spectroscopy methodologies.
The technological advances mentioned above, the outcome of more than ten years
of research and development in synchrotron science, now permit a qualitative
improvement of the ESRF’s experimental programme. These improvements require a
capital investment that is well above the capital investment budget of the ESRF as
given in its present Medium Term Financial Estimate (typically 15 M€). However, it is
important to note that the special investment proposed here is considerably lower
than what would be required (~1000 M€) to construct a new synchrotron centre with
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