PETRA III starts up as a leading light source
On 16 November Germany's federal minister for education and research, Annette Schavan, and DESY's director, Helmut Dosch, took part in firing the starting shot at the inauguration of Hamburg's new synchrotron-radiation source, PETRA III. They were joined by Hamburg senator for science and research, Herlind Gundelach, and Jürgen Mlynek, president of the Helmholtz Association, of which DESY is a member.
PETRA III is the latest reincarnation of the PETRA electron–positron storage ring that ran from 1978 to 1986. As PETRA II it formed part of the injection chain for the HERA electron/positron–proton collider, until HERA shut down in 2007. Now, as PETRA III, it contains a completely new section, with wigglers and undulator magnets to provide the high-brilliance synchrotron radiation (CERN Courier September 2008 p19). The new facility demonstrated its potential in October by establishing a beam of a record-low horizontal emittance of 1 nm rad before final commissioning. The wigglers dampen the beam to guarantee the reduction of its transverse size.
PETRA III will open up new opportunities, especially in the field of structural biology, for example in the research of protein structures. The award of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry shows the importance of this field of research: one of the laureates was Ada Yonath, who from 1986 to 2004 decoded the structure of ribosomes at PETRA III's predecessor at DESY, DORIS III.
The modernization of PETRA and the construction of the new experimental hall for PETRA III were funded jointly by the German government and the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg with €233 million, nearly €150 million of which came from special funds. Following the rule for Helmholtz Association facilities, Hamburg has contributed 10% and the federal government 90% of the total. Within the framework of collective research, the federal ministry of education and research provided an additional €12.2 million for experiments in the current funding period to give scientists from German universities the opportunity for optimal exploitation of PETRA III for their research projects.
Sharkov named as FAIR director designate
Boris Sharkov has been selected to be the scientific director of the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR). He has also become the new leader of the FAIR Joint Core Team at GSI, taking over from Horst Wenninger on 1 September 2009. The team's goal is to create FAIR GmbH as soon as possible in 2010 and start construction of the new accelerator complex in Darmstadt.
Born in Moscow in 1950, Sharkov received his PhD for physics at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI) in 1978. He has worked with CERN and GSI for many years and has been responsible for the collaboration between these institutes and the Russian Alikhanov Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP-Moscow) and later also with the Institut de Physique Nucléaire d'Orsay. He was one of ITEP's directors for several years. Under his leadership the ITEP proton synchrotron was upgraded to the proton-heavy-ion accelerator complex, ITEP-TWAC.
Sharkov was a member of the GSI Experiment Commission from 2002 until 2007 and has been full professor at MEPhI since 2005. He has also been the Russian representative in the FAIR Scientific and Technical Issues Working Group since 2005 and director of the FAIR Russia Research Centre in Moscow since 2007.