A record number of more than 150 persons registered for the Cultural and Natural Heritage workshop among whom only 40% were already ESRF users. This may explain the very high attendance to the optional introduction that was proposed prior to the workshop, and where attendees could learn about the ESRF and its main techniques (tomography, diffraction and spectroscopy), as well as the best ways to write a proposal.

The workshop itself was split into seven sessions: two in the field of paleontology, two in the field of “materials, processes and chaînes opératoires”, one related to conservation and alteration, one focused on inks and papyrus, and one about deep and machine learning. All the talks were of very high quality, not only illustrating recent exemplary applications of synchrotron techniques to the study of cultural and natural heritage, but also pointing out the expectations of the community in terms of sample size, acquisition speed and new methods to be offered in the future at the ESRF.

On the third day of the workshop, two tutorials and one practical were proposed, which were also very well attended.

The last two sessions were dedicated to the presentation of EBS and of related instrumental developments, highlighting the groundbreaking capabilities that will be offered through the ESRF upgrade phase 2 (thanks to the new source, new beamlines and new instruments). The future BM18 and future depth-resolved diffraction set-up at ID22 notably received very strong interest. Finally, the workshop ended with presentations and a lively discussion about upstream and downstream challenges associated with these new instruments (e.g. access models and data policy) which are fundamental for making the experiments a success and which are the core of the Streamline European project, funding the event.

The social program included a poster session, a general public conference, a visit of 19th and 20th centuries collections and the workshop dinner at the Musée de Grenoble. Finally, a guided visit of Fontaine and Grenoble street art took place a the end of the workshop. The strike and actions downtown did not discourage the participants who enjoyed the entire programme.Those who could not attend the workshop can catch up on the presentations via the Youtube streaming.

Photos WS Cultural_Natural_Heritage.JPG