Scientific Highlights from the Division Large Research Facilities
(GFA)
Scientific Highlights
A metal alloy like a sponge
Once the vacuum chambers for the SLS 2.0 upgrade are the right shape, they still need a special surface coating.
A six-metre high oven
The most complicated vacuum chambers for the SLS 2.0 upgrade are being built in the PSI workshop.
500 vacuum chambers for the new ring
Making the tube through which the electrons will race after the SLS 2.0 upgrade.
CHART MagDev CCT Dipole achieves record field
As one of the first CHART projects, the MagDev activity at PSI designed and built a canted-cosine theta (CCT) demonstrator magnet, wound from Nb3Sn conductor.
Ready for SLS2.0: First magnet series measurement completed
The first magnet series consisting of 112 quadrupole electromagnets for SLS2.0 were measured to high precision using a special home-made rotating coils measurement system. This is an important step forward for the realization of SLS2.0, the upgrade of the Swiss Light Source (SLS) at PSI, and a milestone for the members of the Magnet Section in GFA.
Opening the door to X-ray quantum optics
The 'perfect' X-ray beam-splitter: Researchers at SwissFEL have an ingenious solution to produce coherent copies of pulses, facilitating a realm of new X-ray techniques.
New record photon pulse energies at SwissFEL
The very large number of coherent photons produced by free-electron lasers is one of the key qualities of such facilities, attracting users from numerous research fields including chemistry, biology and materials science. Recently, the two branches of PSI's free-electron laser SwissFEL each have reached new record pulse energies, packing more photons than ever before into ultrashort X-ray pulses delivered at rates of 100 Hz to the users of both beamlines.
Novel X-band transverse deflection structure with variable polarization
The growing request for sophisticated electron beam manipulation techniques for the optimization of Free Electron Lasers (FELs) or novel acceleration techniques requires enhanced beam control capabilities and characterization. One of the most important challenge is the development of new diagnostic techniques able to characterize the longitudinal phase space of the beam, including spatial correlation terms, with a resolution in the range of a few tens of fs to sub-fs.
Demonstration of Large Bandwidth Hard X-Ray Free-Electron Laser Pulses at SwissFEL
We have produced hard x-ray free-electron laser (FEL) radiation with unprecedented large bandwidth tunable up to 2%. The experiments have been carried out at SwissFEL, the x-ray FEL facility at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. The bandwidth is enhanced by maximizing the energy chirp of the electron beam, which is accomplished by optimizing the compression setup. We demonstrate continuous tunability of the bandwidth with a simple method only requiring a quadrupole magnet. The generation of such broadband FEL pulses will improve the efficiency of many techniques such as x-ray crystallography and spectroscopy, opening the door to significant progress in photon science. It has already been demonstrated that the broadband pulses of SwissFEL are beneficial to enhance the performance of crystallography, and further SwissFEL users plan to exploit this large bandwidth radiation to improve the efficiency of their measurement techniques.