BEATS: one year into the project

On 27 and 28 February, the BEATS project team met for their first annual meeting since the project kick-off in 2019. Twenty participants from the BEATS member institutes gathered at ALBA, the Spanish synchrotron in Barcelona, for two days of reporting and discussions.

The first day kicked off with a restricted session of the project steering committee followed by a status overview of the project. Next, each work package gave a status report and discussed issues arising. ALBA Director General, Caterina Biscari, welcomed the group before a visit of the storage ring tunnel and different beamlines with Maria José Garcia Fuste, Head of ALBA’s Radiation Protection group, and Josep Nicolas, Head of ALBA’s Optics, Metrology and Support group. The second day was organised around technical meetings on specific aspects including the science case, radiation protection, front-end design and beamline layout.

On concluding the meeting, project coordinator, Axel Kaprolat, said the health status of the project was green and that “after one year on the project, feasibility has been established and much progress achieved. BEATS has become a reality thanks to all the hard work and international collaboration.”

Thanks to ALBA synchrotron for hosting the meeting and a special thanks to Maria José Garcia Fuste and Yolanda Ruiz Molero for the smooth organisation and all the small attentions that made for a productive and enjoyable two days.

Coordinated by the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, the BEATS project will design, procure, construct and commission a beamline for hard X-ray full-field tomography at the SESAME synchrotron in Jordan. It involves leading research facilities in the Middle East (SESAME and the Cyprus Institute), and European synchrotron radiation facilities ALBA-CELLS (Spain), DESY (Germany), Elettra (Italy), INFN (Italy), PSI (Switzerland), SESAME (Jordan) and SOLARIS (Poland). The initiative is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.