Helmholtz Association opens an experimental station at the SESAME X-ray source in Jordan
The HZB colleagues from the Undulators department in front of the freshly spruced-up UE56-SESAME. Since 2019, the team has been working on giving the undulator a second life. Equipped with new magnets and brought up to the state of the art, it has now been installed in the SESAME storage ring in Jordan after 20 years of use at BESSY II. © HZB/Michael Setzpfandt
The undulator was prepared at HZB and stands now at SESAME. It generates the appropriate light spectrum for the HESEB experimental station. © DESY
HESEB extends research possibilities to soft X-rays
A new experimental station has been opened at the X-ray source SESAME in Jordan: HESEB, the Helmholtz-SESAME Beamline, has been designed by five research centres of the Helmholtz Association under the leadership of DESY. It considerably expands the experimental possibilities of the facility.
It will make so-called soft X-ray light available for research at SESAME. The radiation is lower in energy than hard X-rays and offers the possibility of investigating a variety of scientific questions in solid-state, interface and surface physics, in physical chemistry, in biological systems and in the earth and environmental sciences.
The Forschungszentrum Jülich, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB), the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and DESY are involved in the project.
The experts from HZB's accelerator physics department designed and built the undulator that generates the appropriate light spectrum for the HESEB beamline. Undulators are key components in the operation of electron storage rings. The electrons pass through complex magnetic structures and are forced to follow a wave-shaped trajectory. This produces synchrotron radiation of great brilliance.
The undulator designed at HZB uses refurbished components from the UE56-2 undulator combined with a new magnet array assembled, measured and tuned in Berlin over the last two years. The undulator is now installed and functional at SESAME, undergoing integration into the accelerator systems. It will be able to provide circular and variable linear polarised photons from approximately 150 eV to 90 eV.
Read the full press release on the inauguration of the Helmholtz beamline at the SESAME X-ray source in Jordan here.
- BESSY II: How pulsed charging enhances the service time of batteriesAn improved charging protocol might help lithium-ion batteries to last much longer. Charging with a high-frequency pulsed current reduces ageing effects, an international team demonstrated. The study was led by Philipp Adelhelm (HZB and Humboldt University) in collaboration with teams from the Technical University of Berlin and Aalborg University in Denmark. Experiments at the X-ray source BESSY II were particularly revealing.
- Sebastian Keckert wins Young Scientist Award for Accelerator PhysicsDr Sebastian Keckert has been awarded the Young Scientist Award for Accelerator Physics of the German Physical Society (DPG). The prize is endowed with 5000 euros and was presented to him on 21.03. during the spring conference in Berlin. It honours the physicist's outstanding achievements in the development of new superconducting thin-film material systems for cavities.
- The future of BESSYAt the end of February 2024, a team at HZB published an article in Synchrotron Radiation News (SRN). They describe the next development goals for the light source as well as the BESSY II+ upgrade programme and the successor source BESSY III.