German x-ray laser tunnel gets the go ahead

Ned Stafford/ Hamburg, Germany 

The German government has approved construction of a 3.4 km-long underground x-ray laser tunnel that will let scientists watch chemical reactions in action at atomic resolution.  

The tunnel for the European x-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) Project will begin at the German Electron Synchrotron (Desy) site in Hamburg. From Desy, already a global accelerator center, the tunnel will run east at depths of up to 38 meters under populated areas toward an underground experimental hall on a 15-hectare research campus in Schenefeld. 

Researchers at XFEL will include chemists, materials scientists, plasma physicists, structural biologists, and geologists, with potential applications for biomedicine, pharmacy, or combustion and catalysis.  

Construction of the 986 million (£668 million) facility will start by the beginning of next year. Germany will cover up to 75 per cent of the cost, with 12 other nations, including the UK, China and Russia, covering the rest. Bids for the massive construction project - that needed approval of German mining authorities - will be invited at a European level in coming months. German education and research minister Annette Schavan, speaking at the launch ceremony on 5 June, said that enough funding is now allocated to allow completion of the XFEL system by 2013.  

Thomas Tschentscher, a physicist at DESY who is XFEL photo beam coordinator, told Chemistry World  that XFEL will for the first time let scientists record chemical reactions at atomic resolution while they are happening, showing how chemical reaction progress, how biomolecules move, or how solids are formed. 'In simple terms, the XFEL allows us to make a movie of the chemical reaction,' said Tschentscher.  

David Riley, of Queen's University Belfast, UK, was one of 260 scientists from 22 nations who participated in an XFEL users meeting in January. 

Riley, a dense-plasma specialist, says that investing 1 billion for a project with such huge scientific potential is money well spent. 'This facility has not even been built yet and 260 scientists who want to use it attended a meeting to talk about it,' he said.