A week at the European X-ray Free Electron Laser

The European XFEL  is an international research facility that can generate ultrashort X-ray flashes—27 000 times per second and with a brilliance that is a billion times higher than that of the best conventional X-ray radiation sources. The instrument is coupled with the Dipole-100X optical laser at the High Energy Density beamline. Dipole-100X is a unique world-class laser that provide nanosecond, user defined, temporally shaped pulses that once frequency doubled and focussed on target, create the pressure and temperature states of matter relevant to Earth and planetary interiors.

Running experiments that couple both the Dipole-100X and EuXFEL instruments, however, is no easy task. This requires a vast combination of expertise, ranging from light-matter interactions, interferometry, X-ray diffraction, live data analysis, and sample target preparation. This knowledge is usually only available in large facilities in a very limited number of national laboratories.

To overcome these difficulties, we organized the second community-driven proposal to access the instrument, with a team of over 100 scientists from 35 institutions on 3 continents lead by G. Morard and J. Eggert. The experiment was run over 7 days, and was a chance to debug the instrument, design and optimize data acquisition procedures and processing strategies, and ... collect data! 2000 samples were studied, over an unthinkable range of compositions, conditions, and properties, each member of the team bringing on a new project and new topic.

The data collection campaign is finishing now. Let's start looking at all these terabytes of data now.