LEAPS research infrastructures to tackle societal crises
More than 180 scientists, research facilities directors, policymakers and industry representatives travelled to Paul Scherrer Institute from across Europe to attend the LEAPS Plenary Meeting. © Markus Fischer/PSI
Against a backdrop of the energy crisis, scientists and policymakers convened at Paul Scherrer Institute PSI in Switzerland and set out a vision for European accelerator based photon sources to address current and future societal challenges together.
“LEAPS facilities find themselves in a unique position of simultaneously needing to adapt as heavy energy users whilst being an integral part of the solution.” So said Leonid Rivkin from the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, Switzerland, Chair of the League of European Accelerator-based Photon Sources (LEAPS). Speaking at the 5th LEAPS plenary meeting, Rivkin commented that planned facility upgrades to leading European research infrastructures will help favourably shift the balance, providing more X-rays for more science with less energy consumption.
The current energy crisis was an important theme during the 5th LEAPS plenary meeting, held at the Paul Scherrer Institute from the 26th – 28th October 2022. The meeting welcomed more than 180 scientists, policy makers and industry representatives from across Europe. This included directors of the 19 member European accelerator-based photon facilities – i.e. synchrotron light sources and free electron lasers (FELs) - as well as high-level representatives of the European Commission.
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- Only at BESSY II worldwide: IR nanoscopy at very long THz wavelengthsThe team at the IRIS beamline at BESSY II has created a new experimental option: They achieved infrared nanoscopy with a spatial resolution of around 50 nm at very long THz wavelengths. This was possible thanks to a temporal pattern of light pulses known as the low-alpha operating mode at BESSY II. Worldwide, BESSY II is the only synchrotron light source at which users could perform nanoscopy in a single setup from 25 to 4000 cm-1, a unique opportunity for ultra-broadband characterisation of complex materials at the nanoscale in both the life sciences and materials sciences.
- Ultrafast demagnetisation - Thinner iron, stronger effectThe thinner an iron film, the more easily it can be demagnetised by a laser pulse. Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working with Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and other partners, have discovered why: the key lies in the magnetic order at the material's interfaces. In the long term, these findings could contribute to the development of new technologies for magnetic data storage. The results have been published in the scientific journal Advanced Science.
- Blind spot for the arrangement of atomsArtificial intelligence is increasingly being used to predict the properties of new materials. A research team from Jena and the United States now shows in a study published in the journal Nature Computational Science that when language models are used for this purpose, they reliably identify which types of atoms a material contains. However, they make insufficient use of information about how those atoms are arranged in space. Neither larger models nor additional training data resolve this weakness. For material properties that depend strongly on structure, AI models specifically designed to process spatial relationships are therefore the more reliable choice. (DOI: 10.1038/s43588-026-01045-2)