Photon Science 2020

Dear Colleagues and Friends of DESY Photon Science, The year 2020 started very promising with an extremely well-attended DESY and European XFEL Users’ Meeting end of January. More than 1300 participants from 28 countries registered for this event. At that time, the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was considered to be a rather local epidemic in China. However, this changed quickly. Soon afterwards the ‘World Health Organization’ WHO classified Covid-19 as a pandemic, that is still severely affecting our lives and also the way we carry out research at large-scale facilities. Not knowing how heavily the coronavirus might hit Germany and other countries, and considering the uncertainties on upcoming lockdown measures and related travel restrictions of user groups, DESY decided to shut down the operation of its user facilties PETRA III and FLASH by mid of March. However, within a week, first requests for beamtime came from DESY scientists, collaborators and users to contribute to the fight against the pandemic. PETRA III was restarted mainly for SARS-CoV-2-related research already at the end of March. These experiments ranged from screening by X-ray crystallography for possible inhibitors to slow down or even to stop the reproduction of the virus after an infection (DESY, Univ. Hamburg, BNITM, Fraunhofer, EMBL, and many more) over high-resolution X-ray phase contrast tomography of lung and heart tissue from patients deceased due to SARS-CoV-2 (Univ. Göttingen, Medical Hospital Hannover) to SAXS measurements on the bio-physical properties of lipid nanoparticles containing mRNA of the virus as candidates for possible vaccines (Univ. Mainz, BioNTech GmbH, EMBL). A summary of this research is compiled in the ‘Corona Special’ section and in the EMBL article in this report. Regular operation of PETRA III for users commenced beginning of May under very strict safety measures. At FLASH, the shutdown period due to the pandemic was used to carry out an important, time consuming safety check of the superconducting linear accelerator, and operation for users restarted at the beginning of August. Of course, user operation under the conditions of a pandemic is different from what we were used to before. Besides strict safety rules as wearing masks, providing negative Corona tests or even quarantine, only few users were allowed to work at the experimental stations at the same time in order to keep the number of personal contacts low. Where possible, mail-in experiments were carried out or users were participating in or controlling the experiments remotely since travel restrictions did not allow them to get on-site. This resulted in a heavy workload for the beamline staff and was also stressful for many users since a number of scheduled experiments had to be shifted to next year. Despite all challenges, the lessons that we learned during this year will help us in defining the requirements for an increased fraction of mail-in and remote experiments in the future for a more sustainable operation scheme. European XFEL also went into a safety shutdown during spring and resumed operation in summer. Significant progress has been made in the implementation of the instrumentation of the three major user consortia (SFX, HiBEF, hRIXS) with DESY participation. Despite the pandemic situation, the progress for planning the upgrades of our large-scale photon science facilities was hardly slowed down, even if many people were in home office and nearly all meetings were organised as video conferences. For both future upgrade projects, PETRA IV and FLASH2020+, conceptual design reports were published by the end of 2019 and work on the detailed technical designs has started. Eventhough a series of scientific instruments workshops for PETRA IV was organised as video conferences there was a huge enthusiasm among the user community reflected in almost 1400 registered participants in total. In order to prepare a joint future strategy for a complementary ensemble of photon sources in Germany, Helmholtz- Zentrum Berlin (HZB), Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden- Rossendorf (HZDR) and DESY have finalised a ‘National Photon Science Roadmap’ document. Unfortunately, the pandemic situation also affected construction work on-site. Therefore, the building for the Center for X-ray and Nano Science (CXNS) including the DESY NanoLab will get ready in spring 2021 with slight delay. In addition to the already existing partners Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht (HZG) and the Kiel University (CAU), the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) and the Institut für Kristallzüchtung in Berlin (IKZ) joint in as new partners into this scientific activity. Furthermore, the proposed Center for Molecular Water Science (CMWS) has been pushed forward with the wellattended ‘DESY Water Week’ forum before the lockdown. A white paper on the CMWS science activities is close to completion. The year 2020 was exceptional due to the pandemic situation both for research and in particular for the user operation at our facilities. I would like to thank everyone who has helped to ensure that we could continue to do science even under these difficult conditions. Finally, I wish us all that the newly approved vaccines will ease the situation and allow us to return towards normal life during 2021. Edgar Weckert Director DESY Photon Science