European Synchrotron Radiation Facility

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) is a joint research facility situated in Grenoble, France, and supported by 21 countries (13 member countries: France, Germany, Italy, UK, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and 8 associate countries: Austria, Portugal, Israel, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, South Africa).

Some 8,000 scientists visit this particle accelerator each year, conducting upwards of 2,000 experiments and producing around 1,800 scientific publications.

Inaugurated in 1994, it has an annual budget of around 80 million euros, employs over 630 people and is host to more than 7,000 visiting scientists each year.

The ESRF physical plant consists of two main buildings: the experiment hall, containing the 844 metre circumference ring and forty tangential beamlines; and a block of laboratories, preparation suites, and offices connected to the ring by a pedestrian bridge. The linear accelerator electron gun and smaller booster ring used to bring the beam to an operating energy of 6 GeV are constructed within the main ring. Until recently bicycles were provided for use indoors in the ring's circumferential corridor. Unfortunately they have been removed after some minor accidents. But even before this it was not possible to cycle continuously all the way around, since some of the beamlines exit the hall.

Research at the ESRF focuses, in large part, on the use of X-ray radiation in fields as diverse as protein crystallography, earth science, paleontology, materials science, chemistry and physics. Facilities such as the ESRF offer a flux, energy range and resolution unachievable with conventional (laboratory) radiation sources.

In 2014, ancient books destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 are read for the first time in the ESRF. These 1840 fragments were reduced to the status of charred cylinders.

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Wikipedia