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| Jochen Schneider - | |
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After 40 years of very successful work in synchrotron radiation
research DESY enters a new era: The PETRA III storage ring will
be the best 3rd generation synchrotron radiation facility
available for users in 2009 and the Free-Electron Lasers in the
spectral range of the VUV and hard X-rays will revolutionaries
X-ray sciences.
Free-Electron Lasers (FEL) provide femtosecond X-ray flashes
with a peak brilliance nine orders of magnitude higher than
what we get from modern storage rings. The FEL X-ray beams
are tuneable in wavelength and coherent, their average
brilliance can be 4 orders of magnitude higher than that of
storage rings.
With its extremely intense flashes of X-rays with wavelengths
down to 0.1 nm and pulse durations of 10 or 100 femtoseconds
the planned European X-FEL Facility will extend our
methodology to include the investigation of non-equilibrium
states of matter with atomic resolution in space and timer.
The scientific case for FEL facilities is build up in
extrapolating from current research with synchrotron radiation
and optical lasers with emphasis on
- atomic, molecular and cluster phenomena, plasma physics
- non-linear processes and quantum optics
- condensed matter physics and materials science
- ultra-fast chemistry and life-sciences.
However, with such enormous gains in beam intensity and
quality some dream like applications have also been suggested,
especially for the life sciences.
After a description of the PETRA III storage ring facility
examples of the suggested applications of X-ray free-electron
lasers will be presented. Based on the first results obtained
at the VUV-FEL at the TESLA test facility at DESY possible
strategies for performing experiments at linac driven light
sources will be discussed with emphasis on the synergies
expected from a close collaboration between the synchrotron
radiation and optical laser communities on hand, and the
accelerator and particle physics communities on the other hand.
Starting with the pioneering experiments by K. Holmes and
G. Rosenbaum structural biology played a key role in
synchrotron radiation research at DESY. The strong collaboration
with EMBL Outstation will remain a corner stone in DESY's
perspective of the future of photon sciences in Hamburg.
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