- Home
- Users & Science
- Scientific Documentation
- ESRF Highlights
- ESRF Highlights 2009
- Status of the Upgrade Programme
The ten-year Upgrade Programme will preserve the ESRF's lead and competitiveness. It will enable significant progress in the highest priority areas of research such as nanoscience and nanotechnology, environment, energy and transport, climate change mitigation, information technology and materials engineering, biomedical research and human health, as well as fundamental research.
The Upgrade Programme addresses these challenges by developing the necessary key areas of X-ray beam technology with a considerable enhancement to the ESRF beamlines and user support facilities, whilst being complementary to the national light sources. The new beamlines will cater for the research highlight areas of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Pump-and-probe Experiments and Time-resolved Science, Science at Extreme Conditions, Structural and Functional Biology and Soft Matter, and X-ray Imaging. In particular, the Upgrade will give a decisive advantage in the routine use of small X-ray beams, less than 100 nm, able to probe a wide range of materials under real conditions and, often, in real time.
![]() |
Fig. 1: Artists view of the future experimental hall (Credit: Sud Architectes). |
Phase 1 sets in place the infrastructure of buildings and the first part of the instrumentation developments and accelerator upgrades necessary for the new beamlines, and a first set of eight new beamlines consisting of fourteen end-stations.
The main deliverables are:
2009 marks the first year of the seven-year period of Phase I of the Upgrade Programme and good progress has been made in all of the five key Upgrade areas. Many important elements of the Upgrade Programme such as the Instrument Services and Development Division and the Project Coordination Service have been set in place and are already fully operational.
In June 2009 the ESRF Council approved the award of an industrial architect contract for the extension of the experimental hall to the company Séchaud & Bossuyt. With the signature of the contract between ESRF and Séchaud & Bossuyt, the detailed design on the buildings is now underway (Figure 1).
Some of the challenging issues to be addressed include:
Work on the new beamlines started with the production of Conceptual Design Reports (CDRs) for the entire beamline portfolio of 31 public beamlines. The CDRs were discussed at the SAC meeting of May 2009 and recommendations were received from SAC in July 2009. The science cases of all of the conceptual design reports were published on 5 November on the ESRF web site.
Following the review of eleven candidate Upgrade beamline (UPBL) projects by SAC and the subsequent approval by Council, the ESRF management launched the first batch of four UPBL projects. Technical Design Reports (TDRs) have been initiated for four of the UPBL projects in the following sequence:
The source upgrades are progressing well for a number of key areas:
The newly created ESRF Instrumentation Services and Development Division is at the heart of the implementation of the ESRF's project management system. The ISDD engineers and scientists have been intimately involved in the Technical Design Reports and initial feasibility studies. With the first beamlines now being approved, the programme of enabling technologies and instrumentation in X-ray optics, detectors, sample handling, and software will start.
During 2009 a number of partnerships and initiatives have been identified: for Soft Condensed Matter, Materials Engineering, Science at Extreme Conditions and Palaeontology. The most advanced of these is the Soft Condensed Matter Partnership with the signature of the Memorandum of Understanding between ESRF and ILL on 27 November 2009. The French authorities have confirmed their participation in the development of the ESRF and ILL site, to the level of 18 million Euros. This will be shared between a new site entrance, canteen, and, most significantly, a science building acting as a home to the Partnerships.
E. Bruas, P. Elleaume, S. Pérez and H. Reichert