Dancing BESSY-VSR

Paul Goslawski from Godehard Wüstefeld's team was the initiator of this project: Why not demonstrate in vivid form, what the future project BESSY-VSR is all about? With novel cavities to be introduced in synchrotron storage ring BESSY II, the new BESSY-VSR is supposed to compress some of the stored electron buckets. So it is possible to produce brilliant light pulses with variable length: short and long pulses in one ring. The user is able to choose what kind of pulse he needs for his experiment. But the team still has to solve some tricky problems.

Two short movies are now produced to show how BESSY-VSR works and what remains to be solved: The principle as well as the difficulties are now being performed with a dance!

To realize his project, Paul quickly found enthusiastic volunteers: 24 colleagues took part, among them two heads of institutes. Most of them danced in a circle (the storage ring) as "electron buckets", while the "cavities" provided some drive to the system. With the help of a few more colleagues, the shooting of the videos itself only took one afternoon, whereas Paul spent some weekends editing the final film.

But it was worth the effort! Now, the two short films are available in the HZB media centre and on youtube, both in german and english language. "They could even be of good use in presentations", Paul says. Because only motion pictures can illustrate complex physics in an easy way.