LEAPS welcomes a new twinning partner, the Siberian Circular Photon Source (SKIF), a fourth generation light source currently being built in the Science City Kol’tsovo near (15 km) Novosibirsk, Russia.
The project is funded by the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education and coordinated by the Boreskov Institute of Catalysis. The Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics will design and produce the accelerators, including the injector complex and the main storage ring.
According to the Order of the Government of the Russian Federation, the main storage ring of the SRF SKIF has to be commissioned by December 31, 2023 together with the first beamline. By the end of 2024, six beamlines of the first phase of the project implementation will be operating.
After commissioning, SRF SKIF will start providing access to six experimental stations to conduct advanced research in diverse fields including solid-state physics and chemistry, materials science, and biomedicine. Beamtime distribution will be decided by free competition peer-reviewed by international expert panels. The targeted value of user beamtime is 4500 hours per year with the user operation uptime of no less than 95%.
The LEAPS community is looking forward to a fruitful collaboration.