BESSY II is ready for user service
A view of what had been the practically empty segment at EMIL in the experimental hall; the beam tubes for EMIL are already being marked out on the brand-new flooring. Photo: Ingo Müller/HZB
BESSY II was shut down as scheduled from February 9th until the end of March for refurbishment and modernization. The accelerator is operational once again, and has been running since the beginning of April, beginning with beam scrubbing to increase the lifetime of the electrons in the storage ring and to improve operation. At the same time teams have been working on the calibration and commissioning of their instruments. BESSY II will be ready for user service once again on April 21 2015.
The new flooring shines - it desperately needed to be re-done in heavily worn areas. But that is just the most obvious update undertaken during this shutdown. At least five major projects were coordinated since the beginning of February. „Our best thanks to the staff, who worked overtime to get everything ready“, says Prof. Anke Kaysser-Pyzalla, scientific director of HZB, „now User Service can start again as planned.“
As a result BESSY II is now equipped with a state-of-art Personal Safety Interlock to ensure safe operation. “The interlock shuts off the machine immediately or brings it to a safe state if someone makes an error while in operation or opens a door to a restricted area”, explains Müller. The new interlock system is based on modern safety PLCs. These programmable logic controllers are certified and the operation of the entire system was inspected and accepted by the radiation safety officer.
Vacuum Sement rebuilt for EMIL
The EMIL laboratory has been added, therefore a vacuum segment in the storage ring needed to be completely re-built. "During this shutdown we also prepared the vacuum system needed for both undulators that have been designed by the Undulator-team specifically for EMIL", Christian Jung (Scientific-Technical Infrastructure II) explains. This is because energies of up to 10,000 eV will be needed for EMIL instead of just the normal 60 to 2000 eV for nominal BESSY II operations.
Modern RF amplifyers and a multipole wavelength shifter have been installed
The replacement of two out of the four klystron-based RF amplifiers, used to power the RF cavities was also very elaborate. They were replaced by newly designed Solid State RF amplifiers. The multipole wavelength shifter on the EDDI beamline, which was damaged last year, has now also been repaired and re-installed.
Dipole front-end systems will get new absorbers
“In addition, we installed new beam line absorbers on a quarter of the dipole front-end systems during this shutdown. That was necessary because we have a 300 mA beam current present at all times in the ring due to operating in top-up mode", Jung explains.
User service resumes April 21, but the next shutdown is already being planned. The work that began during the 2013 shutdown should be completed by the end of 2015. Still on the agenda: replacement of the last two “old” RF cavities in the machine with new RF cavities, installation of the two new undulators for EMIL, changeover of the remaining klystron-based RF amplifiers to Solid State technology as well as fitting new absorbers in the remaining dipole front-end systems.
- New method shows how molecular switches are influenced by their neighborsResearchers at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Helmholtz Centre Berlin (HZB) have, for the first time, been able to directly observe how the environment surrounding a molecular switch influences its electronic structure. Molecular switches are molecules that can be switched between two states by external influences such as changes in temperature—similar to a switch with the positions »On« and »Off«. Such molecules are being investigated as potential building blocks for future data storage devices or sensor materials. Using magnetic-field-dependent terahertz spectroscopy, the researchers have now, for the first time, been able to distinguish whether neighbouring molecules in a material are in the same or different states. The results have been published in the journal »Angewandte Chemie International Edition«.
- BESSY II is back in operation after maintenance shutdownOn 7 September 2026, BESSY II was set into operation after a four-week shutdown. BESSY II is scheduled to resume full user operation on 22 September.
- 3D magnetic field experiment at BESSY II takes spintronics a step further(Fe0.63Ni0.3Pd0.07)3P or FNPP is a magnetic material that exhibits complex magnetic structures even at room temperature. This makes the material of interest for spintronics, a field that could enable data processing with significantly lower energy consumption. One potential application is novel magnetic memory devices. However, generating and modifying the desired structures in a controlled manner remains a challenge to date. A new study led by HZB has now taken a step forward in this regard. They demonstrated at the worldwide unique VEKMAG-Station at BESSY II, that a tiny external B-field in the plane of the magnetic patterns is sufficient to change them.