European XFEL – New Opportunities for X-ray Science

The European X-ray Free Electron Laser is the brightest X-ray free electron in the world due to its superconducting accelerator that allows the delivery of up 27000 intense, ultrashort pulses per second. The accelerator started commissioning end 2016. First lasing at hard x-ray energies was observed in May 2017 and the photons systems started commissioning mid-2017. The facility went into operation July 1 2017. First user experiments were started September 14 2017. It is the world’s first hard X-ray laser facility based on superconducting accelerator technology and will deliver an unprecedented X-ray beam to the user community. The first two instruments open for user experiments are the FXE instrument for ultra-fast x-ray spectroscopy and x-ray scattering and on the SPB/SFX instrument for diffractive imaging and structural determination for single particles, clusters and biomolecules. In 2018/2019 four more instruments will be taken into operation covering a wide range of scientific fields. In the talk a description of the facility [1] will be given including a report of the status of the operation and a glimpse into results from the first experiments. [1] T. Tschentscher, C. Bressler, J. Grünert, A. Madsen, A. P. Mancuso, M. Meyer, A. Scherz, H. Sinn, U. Zastrau Appl. Sci. 2017, 7(6), 592; doi:10.3390/app7060592