PaNdata brings together thirteen major world class European research infrastructures. Each of the research infrastructures operates one or more neutron or photon sources, and each of this sources is equipped with a large number of instruments, providing ample research opportunities. PaNdata facilities welcome more than 30.000 users every year from all continents and a very broad range of scientific disciplines.
PaNdata started as a very small group of synchrotron and neutron facilities applying for funds in one of the e-infrastructure calls, but grew quite rapidly over the last year. Meanwhile the vast majority of the photon and neutron facilities in Europe joined PaNdata, very recently the Swedish Synchrotron MAX IV Laboratory and the Jülich Centre for Neutron Science (JCNS) - operating several instruments at FRM-II as well as ILL.
The image provides links to the individual PaNdata partners web sites. Further below, you can find a brief description of the individual facilities.
STFC/ISIS
STFC is the UK public sector research organisation providing access to large scale scientific facilities. It has an expenditure of £500 million p.a. with 2500 staff based at seven locations including the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) where this project is centred. Two departments of STFC will be involved in this project. ISIS is the world‘s leading pulsed spallation neutron source. It runs 700 experiments per year performed by 1600 users on the 22 instruments. These experiments generate 1TB of data in 700,000 files. All data ever measured at ISIS over twenty years is stored at the Facility, some 2.2 million files in all. ISIS use is predominantly UK but includes most European countries through bilateral agreements and EU funded access. There are nearly 10,000 people registered on the ISIS user database of which 4000 are non-UK EU. The user base is expanding significantly with the arrival of the Second Target Station. e-Science provides the STFC facilities with an advanced IT infrastructure including massive data storage, high-end supercomputing, vast network bandwidth, and interoperability with other IT infrastructure in the UK and internationally ... more
ALBA/CELLS
ALBA is a third generation synchrotron facility near Barcelona, Spain to be constructed and exploited by the consortium CELLS financed equally by Spain and Catalonia. It will include a 3 GeV low emittance storage ring which will feed an intense photon beam to a number of beamlines dedicated to basic and applied research. The accelerator complex will consist in a 100 MeV Linear Accelerator and a Booster that will ramp the electron beam energy up to the nominal energy of 3 GeV. The maximum operational design current is 400 mA and it will be operated in top up mode.
In the first phase, an ensemble of seven beamlines will be operational in 2010. In the subsequent Phases, more beamlines are expected to be built. Phase I beamlines are state of the art in terms of optics and instrumentation. They are as follows: 1) Non Crystalline Diffraction beamline (NCD) for SAXS and WAXS experiments, 2) Macromolecular Crystallography (XALOC), 3) Photoemission (CIRCE), 4) X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), 5) High Resolution Powder Diffraction (MSPD), 6) X ray Circular Magnetic Dichroism (XMCD) and 7) X ray microscopy (MISTRAL) ... more
CEA/LLB
The French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA: Commissariat à l'énergie atomique) is a public body leader in research, development and innovation. The CEA mission statement has two main objectives: To become the leading technological research organization in Europe and to ensure that the nuclear deterrent remains effective in the future. The CEA is active in three main fields: Energy, Information and health technologies, Defense and national security. In each of these fields, the CEA maintains a cross-disciplinary culture of engineers and researchers, building on the synergies between fundamental and technological research. In 2008, the total CEA workforce consisted of 15 000 employees (52 % of whom were in management grades). The Léon Brillouin Laboratory (LLB) is the National Laboratory of neutron scattering, serving science and industry. The LLB uses the neutrons produced by Orphée, a fission reactor of 14 MW of power ... more
DESY
DESY has a long history in High Energy Physics (HEP) and Synchrotron radiation. DESY operates a Tier-1 centre for the LHC project and has proven expertise in the management and storage of very large data volumes. DESY jointly provides the major software framework (dCache) for large scale and secure data storage and is currently establishing the infrastructure for long term archival and management of the data and metadata from all photon science experiments on site, enabling remote access to data as well as dedicated compute resources, the PaNdata data policy framework being a crucial element for this effort. DESY is currently operating two dedicated synchrotron sources (Doris and Petra III) as well as a free electron laser for the VUV and soft X-ray wavelength regime (FLASH) ... more
DIAMOND
Diamond Light Source is a new 3rd generation synchrotron light facility. It became operational in January 2007 and is the largest scientific facility to be funded in the UK for over 40 years. The UK Government, through STFC, and the Wellcome Trust have invested £380M to construct Diamond and its first 22 beamlines of which currently 13 are operational with the remaining 9 entering service in the next few months. Diamond will ultimately host as many as 40 beamlines, supporting the life, physical and environmental sciences. Diamond's X-rays can help determine the structure of viruses and proteins, important information for the development of new drugs to fight everything from flu to HIV and cancer. The X-rays can penetrate deep into steel and help identify stresses and strain within real engineering components such as turbine blades. They can help improve process for the manufacture of plastics and foods by allowing scientists to observe changing conditions, as well as helping scientists develop smaller magnetic recording materials - important for data storage in computers ... more
ELETTRA
Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A. is a national laboratory located in the outskirts of Trieste (Italy). Its mandate is a scientific service to the Italian and international research communities, based on the development and open use of light produced by synchrotron and Free Electron Lasers (FEL) sources. The ELETTRA infrastructure consists of a State of the art (2-2.4) GeV electron storage ring and about 30 synchrotron radiation beam lines with 13 insertion devices. ELETTRA covers the needs of a wide variety of experimental techniques and scientific fields, including photoemission and spectromicroscopy, macromolecular crystallography, low-angle scattering, dichroic absorption spectroscopy, and x-ray imaging serving the communities of materials science, surface science, solid-state chemistry, atomic and molecular physics, structural biology, and medicine. ELETTRA is now building a new light source called FERMI@Elettra ... more
ESRF
The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility is a third generation synchrotron light source, jointly funded by 19 European countries. It operates 40 experimental stations in parallel, serving over 3500 scientific users per year. At the ESRF, physicists work side-by-side with chemists, materials scientists, biologists etc., and industrial applications are growing, notably in the fields of pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals and microelectronics. It is the largest and most diversified laboratory in Europe for X-ray science, and plays a central role in Europe for synchrotron radiation. The ESRF is currently engaging in a development programme for the next 10 years referred to as the Upgrade Programme. International collaborations will be paramount for the success of the ESRF Upgrade Programme, and cover many scientific disciplines including instrumentation and computing developments ... more
HZB
The Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin (HZB) has emerged in the beginning of 2009 from the merger of BESSY and the Hahn-Meitner Institute. The new centre thus operates two large scale facilities for the investigation of structure and function of matter: the research reactor BER II, for experiments with neutrons, and the electron storage ring facility BESSY II for the production of synchrotron radiation. The HZB also operates the Metrology Light Source, a dedicated storage ring for the German National Metrology Institute PTB (Physikalisch-Technische-Bundesanstalt). The storage ring BESSY II in Adlershof is at present Germany's largest third generation synchrotron radiation source. BESSY II emits extremely brilliant photon pulses ranging from the long wave terahertz region to hard X rays. The 46 beamlines at the undulator, wiggler, and dipole sources offer users a many-faceted choice of experimental stations. The combination of brilliance and photon pulses makes BESSY II the ideal microscope for space and time, allowing resolutions down to femtoseconds and picometres. The research reactor BER II delivers neutron beams for a wide range of scientific investigations, in particular for materials sciences ... more
ILL
The Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL), founded in 1967, is the European research centre operating the most intense slow neutron source in the world. It is owned and operated by its three founding countries – France, Germany and the United Kingdom – whose grants to the Institute‘s budget are enhanced by 11 other European partners. ILL is a major player in the European neutron community networks, ENSA and FP7 (NMI3, ESFRI), working with the European Commission to establish and support R&D programs on neutron technology, networks of excellence and workshops. It is also a member of the EIROforum collaboration between seven of Europe‘s foremost scientific research organization. The ILL‘s mission is to provide the international scientific community with a unique flow of neutrons and a matching suite of experimental facilities (some 40 instruments) for research in fields as varied as solid-state physics, material science, chemistry, biology, nuclear physics and engineering ... more
JCNS
The Jülich Centre for Neutron Science (JCNS) develops and operates neutron scattering instruments at some of the world's leading neutron sources (FRM II, ILL, SNS) under a common scientific objective, and it coordinates Germany's contribution to the forthcoming European spallation source ESS. In-house research focuses on ―correlated electron systems and nanomagnetism‖ as well as ―soft matter and biophysics‖. In these areas of expertise, the JCNS offers expert support on world-class instruments with a specialized sample environment and ancillary laboratory access to external users. The JCNS outstation at the world‘s highest flux research reactor at ILL in Grenoble, JCNS operates the Collaborative Research Group instruments, IN12, IN22 and D23, in a consortium with the French CEA ... more
MAX IV Laboratory
The MAX IV Laboratory in Lund, Sweden, is a national research laboratory comprising of MAX-lab and the MAX IV project. The MAX IV project opens new possibilities for cutting-edge research within broad areas of science, for example materials science, structure biology and nano technology. MAX IV will be the next generation synchrotron light facility and will replace the existing laboratory, i.e. the storage rings MAX I, II and III. The MAX IV Laboratory has developed out of the accelerator research that has been executed at the Lund University since the 1960’s; Lund University in Sweden is the host University for the Facility ... more
PSI
Within the Swiss research and education landscape, PSI (Paul Scherrer Institut), plays a special role as a user lab, developing and operating large, complex research facilities. The two large-scale PSI facilities, the Swiss Light Source (SLS) for photon science and the Neutron Spallation Source (SINQ), are responsible for more than 3,000 user visits per year, about half of them international. During the 20 year history of PSI, nearly 20,000 external researchers have performed experiments in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, material sciences, energy technology, environmental science and medical technology. The Swiss Light Source (SLS) is a third-generation synchrotron light source. With an energy of 2.4 GeV, it provides photon beams of high brightness for research in materials science, biology and chemistry with 16 beamlines in user operation (2009) and 18 as final number. The Spallation Neutron Source (SINQ) is a continuous source - the first of its kind in the world - with a flux of about 1014 n/cm2/s. Besides thermal and cold neutrons for materials research and the investigation of biological substances ... more
SOLEIL
The Synchrotron SOLEIL is a 3rd generation synchrotron radiation facility in operation since 2007. In 2009, 1,719 users have performed 348 experiments on the 14 first open beamlines. Currently, SOLEIL is delivering photons to 21 beamlines with a current of 400 mA in top-up mode: 17 beamlines are open to users and 4 under commissioning. In addition, new challenging beamlines are under construction or under design, while SOLEIL is developing technical platforms as the IPANEMA one for Cultural Heritage research. More than 2,000 users from France, Europe and other countries are expected per year to perform experiments in various fields as surface and material science, environmental and earth science, very dilute species and biology ... more
