SwissFEL

The New Highlight in Switzerland's Research Infrastructures

Welcome to the Website of the SwissFEL, Switzerland's X-ray free-electron laser at the Paul Scherrer Institute.

The SwissFEL is based on a novel technology holding exceptional promises for diverse areas of scientific research. Serving our society's modern trends "smaller, faster, more complex", SwissFEL will provide unprecedented insights into structures as small as an atom and into phenomena as fast as the vibrations of molecular bonds. It will also reveal the secrets behind the inner complexity of technologically relevant materials and biochemical structure and interaction.

Read more about SwissFEL in the 'About' Section:

About SwissFEL

Introduction on SwissFEL and X-rays

Technical Overview

How a FEL works, technical components

Why SwissFEL

Science and Business case

Latest Research Highlights

1 March 2019

Figure 1. Layout depicting the experimental conditions at the Alvra experimental station. (b) Fresnel simulation of the Talbot carpet: intensity distribution of the experimental conditions for a 1D diamond phase grating with a 200 nm pitch and 2.985 keV photon energy. The inset (c) shows the detailed structure of the interference pattern in the vicinity of the sample where the pitch is 190 nm

Towards X-ray Transient Grating Spectroscopy at SwissFEL

The high brilliance of new X-ray sources such as X-ray Free Electron Laser opens the way to non-linear spectroscopies. These techniques can probe ultrafast matter dynamics that would otherwise be inaccessible. One of these techniques, Transient Grating, involves the creation of a transient excitation grating by crossing X-ray beams on the sample. Scientists at PSI have realized a demonstration of such crossing by using an innovative approach well suited for the hard X-ray regime.

17 December 2018

First femtosecond protein pump-probe measurements at SwissFEL

A major milestone in the commissioning of SwissFEL has been reached: the first pump-probe experiments on proteins have been successfully carried out. Crystals of several retinal-binding proteins were delivered in a viscous jet system and a femtosecond laser was used to start the isomerization reaction. Microsecond to sub-picosecond snapshots were then collected, catching the retinal proteins shortly after isomerization of the chromophore.

6 December 2018

EU grants 14 million to Swiss Researchers

Media Releases Materials Research Matter and Material Research Using Neutrons Large Research Facilities

A team with three researchers from the ETH Domain has been awarded a prestigious EU grant. Today, they received the contract signed by the EU confirming the extraordinary 14 million euros funding. With it, they will investigate quantum effects which could become the backbone of future electronics.

18 October 2018

SwissFEL's First Call for Proposals

The first SwissFEL call for proposals took place, deadline for submission was the 15th of September. In this first call for proposals SwissFEL received overwhelming interest from the user community. A total of 47 proposals were submitted for the SwissFEL Alvra experimental station and 26 for the Bernina experimental station. The Proposal Review committee PRC took place on 18-19 October 2018.

18 September 2018

Bernina status first summer shutdown

The summer shutdown was used to install more missing hardware. With the new components the Bernina instrument will be already very close to the full design capabilities when the exciting time of user experiments will begin in 2019.

12 August 2018

First serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) pilot user experiment at SwissFEL

On the 7th to 12th of August 2018, a collaborative group of scientists from the Paul Scherrer Institute and members of the LeadXpro and Heptares pharmaceutical companies led by Karol Nass (PSI macromolecular crystallography MX-SLS group) performed the first serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) pilot user experiment at the SwissFEL X-ray free electron laser (XFEL).

20 June 2018

MOOCs – a paradigm shift in education

In March 2018, the nine-week MOOC “Introduction to synchrotrons and x-ray free-electron lasers” (abbreviated to “SYNCHROTRONx”) came online via the edX provider of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), created by Phil Willmott of the Swiss Light Source, Paul Scherrer Institute. “MOOC” is an acronym for “massive open online course”, a teaching platform started in the first decade of this century, which has become increasingly popular in the last five to six years. MOOCs have no limits to participation and are free. Some of the most popular MOOCs can attract many tens of thousands of participants. Even the most specialized subjects may have an initial enrollment of over a thousand, more than an order of magnitude larger than that typically found in traditional higher education. There were over 70 million MOOC enrollments covering nearly 10’000 subjects offered by the top five providers in 2017 alone!

6 April 2018

A first glance at the SwissFEL x-rays wave-front

X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFELs) combine the properties of synchrotron radiation (short wavelengths) and laser radiation (high lateral coherence, ultrashort pulse durations). These outstanding machines allow to study ultra-fast phenomena at an atomic level with unprecedented temporal resolution for answering the most intriguing open questions in biology, chemistry and physics.

17 December 2017

First Pilot Experiment at SwissFEL-Alvra on UV photo-induced charge transfer in OLED system

On the 17th of December 2017 SwissFEL saw its first pilot experiment in the Alvra experimental station of the SwissFEL ARAMIS beamline. A team of scientists from the University of Bremen, Krakow and PSI, led by Matthias Vogt (Univ. Bremen) and Chris Milne (PSI)in collaboration with J. Szlachetko, J. Czapla-Masztafiak, W. M. Kwiatek (Inst. of Nucl.Phys. PAN (Krakow), successfully did the first pilot experiment at SwissFEL-Alvra on UV photo-induced charge transfer in OLED system.

SwissFEL Science Case

Utrafast Phenomena at the Nanoscale: Science opportunities at the SwissFEL X-ray Laser

SwissFEL Science Case Download

Photon Science Division

Home page of Photon Science Division (PSD)

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