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SOLARIS joins the League of European Accelerator based-Photon Sources
At the LEAPS launch event in Brussels on 13 November 2017, 16 organisations representing 19 light sources facilities across Europe signed an agreement to strengthen their collaboration. Among the initiators of the agreement and its signatories was prof. dr hab. Marek Stankiewicz, director of the SOLARIS Centre.
The event was attended by Robert-Jan Smits, Director General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission, and Giorgio Rossi, Chair of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). Some 150 participants from all over Europe as well as guests from the US joined discussions and gave input to the board of LEAPS how to best use the power of combined effort to ensure that European light source facilities continue to be world-leading.
LEAPS is a collaboration that brings together light sources that each produce exceptionally intense beams of X-rays, ultraviolet, and infrared light. These enable insights, which are not possible with more conventional equipment for both basic and applied research, covering virtually all fields of science from physics, chemistry, and biology, to energy, medicine, cultural heritage, and engineering. They can be compared to ‘super microscopes,’ which enable research on samples in the tiniest detail, helping make invisible information strikingly visible.
Light sources encompass both the synchrotron light source community, which produce highly intense continuous beams, and the free-electron lasers community, producing high intensity short pulsed laser-like beams. Both types of light source complement one another. Light source facilities have been working alongside each other in Europe successfully for years, supporting world-class science. In the past 5 years alone, LEAPS members have welcomed 24 000 direct users, who have had an impact on a wider network of 35 000 researchers, with 23 400 unique articles published in peer-reviewed journals.
The future holds great promise too: new technologies to produce and exploit yet more powerful sources of light have been conceived, with the potential to transform the impact on increasingly complex scientific and societal problems. Realising this promise in the face of rising international competition requires facilities across Europe to draw even more effectively on their collective strengths, and to do so swiftly.
Modification date 09/04/2022
- Agnieszka Cudek
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