Aerial view of the ESRF, Credit: ESRF/P.Jayet 
X-rays shine again at the ESRF, Credit: ESRF
On 30 January 2020, beamlines saw first EBS beam, one month ahead of schedule.
It’s a great achievement for the EBS project. After reaching in the last two days stable operation conditions of the new EBS storage ring at 100 mA injection current, 26 out of 27 Insertion Device beamlines opened their front-end with 5 mA stored electron beam current.
The EBS X-ray beam – on all these beamlines, at distances from the source varying from 45 to 160 m, depending on the specific beamline – was found within fractions of millimetres from its position as measured in December 2018 before the start of the shutdown.
“The beam shape is extremely good and almost cylindrical as expected, with sub-millimetre size at 100 m from the source! X-rays are shining again in the ESRF Experimental Hall!”,says Francesco Sette, Director General.
“This has never been seen before”, said Harald Reichert, Director of Research. “We’ve taken out a 1km long machine, we have put a new one in and we have 5km of beamlines to align. And it is working straight away, it is pretty amazing”, he adds.
“This shows how the teams have worked in tune with each other to accomplish a real feat, especially we are very grateful to the alignment group for a perfect job. This success means that we are very optimistic for the restart of the scientific experiments”, adds Jean Susini, Director of Research.
EBS is 150M€ upgrade programme to replace the ESRF third-generation source with a brand-new machine that will boost the performance of the X-ray beams by 100, giving scientists new research opportunities in fields such as health, energy, environment, new materials. The EBS revolutionary lattice has already been adopted by other synchrotrons around the world, including the United States, Japan and China.