The €1.22bn European X-ray Free Electron Laser (E-XFEL) in the Hamburg region of Germany has been inaugurated at a ceremony held today at the lab. The opening was attended by several officials including Germany’s research minister Johanna Wanka and the mayor of Hamburg, Olaf Scholz.

The 3.4 km-long E-XFEL uses a superconducting linear accelerator to accelerate electrons before passing them through an “undulator” where they produce coherent X-ray beams 27,000 times per second and with a luminance a billion times higher than that of the best conventional X-ray sources. Each pulse will last less than 100 fs (10^–13 s), allowing researchers to create movies of chemical reactions and decipher the molecular composition of viruses and cells.

Two instruments

Experiments will begin in mid-September for two months and on two instruments: one called Femtosecond X-Ray Experiments and the other Single Particles, Clusters, and Biomolecules and Serial Femtosecond Crystallography.

The E-XFEL has 11 international partners: Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. The UK is in the process of joining.