13th Users' Meeting

19-02-2003

Grenoble, 10-14 February 2003

GETTING USERS TOGETHER

The 13th Users' Meeting and associated Workshops attracted 366 participants from Europe, the USA and Japan. The Users' Meeting day, which took place in the World Trade Centre, included scientific talks, the Young Scientist Award, posters sessions and discussion groups about the main scientific areas at the ESRF.

They come a few days a year in groups of three or four, to work on their experiment at a beamline day and night and then to return to their home institutes with lots of data for analysis. These are the Users' visits to the ESRF, more than 4000 every year (4358 in 2001 under the "public" user programme). The Users' Meeting is their annual opportunity to get together with other users and ESRF scientists and exchange information and points of views on the running of the facility.

The workshops also provide a good opportunity to learn about various fields of research. This year, they concentrated on Inelastic Scattering, Membrane Structure and Function and Detectors for Beamlines.

On the Users' Meeting day, there were four talks highlighting some very recent advances made at ESRF. W. Eberhardt, from Bessy, Germany, described the "Study of magnetism and magnetic materials using synchrotron radiation". A. Plech, from the University of Konstanz, Germany, focused on "Resolving structural kinetics on the picosecond time scale". The following talk, "The hard X-ray microprobe: elucidating composition/structure relations in real-life materials", was given by K. Janssens, from the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Finally, Miquel Coll, from the CSIC, Spain, spoke about "DNA transfer machinery".

The Users' Meeting wasn't only about scientific plenary talks. It was also about knowing what the scientist next door (or beamline) is doing. Therefore, an exhibition of 68 posters illustrating different experiments decorated the hall of the World Trade Centre. The scientists working on each of them were happy to satisfy the curiosity of anyone stopping by. At the end of the day, there was a prize for the best poster that went to Olga Kurapova for her poster entitled "Beryllium Parabolic Refractive Lenses".

The organizing team

The new team of the User Organization

And still more prizes! The traditional Young Scientist Award went to Claudia Dallera, from the Politecnico de Milano for her work on high-energy X-ray emission and high energy photoemission at the ESRF (read more on the YSA news). It is the first time that this prize has been awarded to a woman.

This meeting was also full of news. The Users' Organization announced the change of their chairman for the next two years and also of some of their nine members. Marco Grioni, from the Institut de Physique des Nanostructures in Lausanne takes over the duties from the Finnish Keijo Hämäläinen. The Director General, Bill Stirling drew up a balance of the improvements achieved in 2002. He also highlighted some news from the facility and major projects underway and stated that "the ESRF is growing healthily".

partners

European Synchrotron Radiation Facility - 71, avenue des Martyrs, CS 40220, 38043 Grenoble Cedex 9, France.