DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron)

What they do

DESY, founded in Hamburg on 18 December 1959, builds and runs particle accelerators. It has about 2,900 to 3,000 staff at two sites, Hamburg and Zeuthen near Berlin, and welcomes more than 3,000 guest scientists from over 40 countries each year. About 90 per cent of its budget comes from the federal government, with the rest from Hamburg and Brandenburg.

Why it matters

DESY began as a particle physics laboratory and is famous for that: the gluon, the particle that holds quarks together, was first detected in 1979 by experiments at its PETRA ring. Today its biggest impact comes from light. Accelerated electrons give off extremely bright X-rays, and since 2009 the rebuilt PETRA III ring has served more than 40 experimental stations where chemists, biologists and engineers study materials atom by atom.

Products to know

• PETRA III: one of the world's brightest storage ring X-ray sources. During the pandemic a team used it to test almost 6,000 known drugs against the main protease of SARS-CoV-2; 37 bound to the enzyme, and the results were published in Science in April 2021.
• FLASH: the world's first soft X-ray free-electron laser, a user facility since 2005.
• European XFEL: the 3.4 km X-ray laser running from Hamburg to Schenefeld, in user operation since September 2017, built for 1.25 billion euros (2005 prices). DESY is its main shareholder and runs its 1.7 km superconducting accelerator.

The German angle

DESY shows how big science moves into products. Pharmaceutical and materials companies book beamtime to examine catalysts, battery electrodes and drug candidates, and the superconducting accelerator technology developed in Hamburg was scaled up for European XFEL, an international facility with twelve signatory countries but German leadership.

Sources

• Helmholtz Association: DESY
• Wikipedia: DESY
• MPSD: X-ray screening identifies candidate substances for COVID treatment
• idw: European XFEL press release