France supports the European XFEL
With a contribution of 36 million euro toward the facility’s construction, France has officially joined the European XFEL as a shareholder country. France joins the 12 countries that have signed the European XFEL convention.
The European XFEL, currently under construction in the Hamburg area, will be an international research facility of superlatives: 27.000 X-ray flashes per second and a brilliance that is a billion times higher than that of the best conventional X-ray sources will open up completely new opportunities for science. The facility starts user operation in 2017.
“France has been involved in the build-up of the European XFEL since the very beginning, and now I am happy to see that all formal aspects are complete”, says European XFEL Managing Director Massimo Altarelli. “I look forward to seeing a deeper and deeper involvement of French scientists in the development of our scientific program.”
European XFEL is a non-profit company. Its shareholders are designated by the governments of the international partners who commit themselves in an intergovernmental convention to support the construction and operation of the research facility. With the addition of France, a total of nine countries out of the 12 signatories of the 2009 European XFEL convention have formalised their commitment to the project by becoming shareholders: Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, and Switzerland.
The French National Centre for Scientific Research [CNRS] contributes to European XFEL through the production, radiofrequency conditioning, and delivery of accelerator power couplers. The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission [CEA] contributes to the European XFEL with the assembly of its 100 accelerator modules and with the provision of the beam position monitors for the accelerators’ cavities.
For more information can be found in the European XFEL website.
