Hamburg’s DESY laboratory is to convert its PETRA storage ring into a third-generation synchrotron radiation source following a € 1.4 million grant from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to cover the design phase. A formal proposal will be submitted in 2004, allowing reconstruction to begin in January 2007. The new light source, PETRA III, will run at 6 GeV with a current of more than 100 mA. DESY expects the 13-15 planned undulator beam lines to provide the highest brilliance of any storage ring-based source at start-up. PETRA was used for particle physics research from 1978 to 1986. Since then, as PETRA II, it has formed part of the injector chain for DESY’s HERA collider.
