The European XFEL, running between Hamburg and the town of Schenefeld, is the world’s largest X-ray free-electron laser — a 3.4-kilometre machine that fires X-ray flashes a billion times brighter than a conventional synchrotron, and far more frequently than any comparable facility.
Unlike a storage ring, a free-electron laser does not recirculate its electrons; it accelerates them down a long superconducting linac and drives them through undulators to generate brief, intensely bright laser-like X-ray pulses. The European XFEL produces these pulses in rapid bursts — already several thousand per second, with tens of thousands per second envisaged at full performance — which lets scientists capture fast processes that ordinary sources cannot resolve.
At a glanceFacility profile
- Location
- Schenefeld, near Hamburg, Germany
- Operator
- European XFEL GmbH, with DESY as principal shareholder and several partner nations
- Type
- X-ray free-electron laser (superconducting linac)
- Energy
- Up to 17.5 GeV
- Instruments
- Six scientific instrument stations
- User operation
- Since September 2017
- Website
- xfel.eu
The scienceWhat researchers do here
The European XFEL’s pulses are both extraordinarily bright and extraordinarily short, which makes it a kind of ultrafast camera for the atomic world. Scientists use it to record the atomic detail of viruses and proteins before radiation can damage them, to film chemical reactions and the making and breaking of molecular bonds as they unfold, and to recreate and study the extreme conditions found deep inside planets.
Each flash lasts only femtoseconds — long enough to take an atomic snapshot, short enough to do so before the sample is destroyed.
Access for researchers
The European XFEL allocates beam time through periodic calls for proposals, reviewed on scientific merit, with experiments carried out at its instrument stations in Schenefeld.