Over the past 50 years and more, DESY has moved from being a relatively small national research facility to become one of the world’s most important centres for particle physics and research with X-ray radiation. The secret behind this success story has been DESY’s expertise in the development, construction and operation of large-scale particle accelerators. It is exactly these highly complex pieces of scientific equipment that enable DESY to conduct cutting-edge research.

Serving the research community

When it comes to investigating the smallest building blocks of the physical world, particle accelerators are an indispensable tool. DESY’s mission is to provide such facilities for scientists from Germany and throughout the world. As the research centre’s statutes in 1959, the year in which it was founded, stated, “The purpose of the DESY foundation is to enable and assist fundamental research in the natural sciences, first and foremost by building and operating particle accelerators and providing for the scientific use there of, particularly in the field of research with elementary particles and synchrotron radiation as well as research and development related to these activities.”

Challenging accelerators

Almost all of the research carried out at DESY – whether in the field of particle physics or with the extremely intense light produced by the accelerators – depends crucially upon the performance and reliability of the accelerator facilities. It should therefore come as no surprise that the Accelerator Division has the highest number of staff at DESY. All in all, around 600 people, divided among 18 groups, work on accelerator development, construction and operation, in close cooperation with universities, research institutions and industrial companies from Germany and throughout the world. To design, build and then successfully run such huge and sophisticated pieces of high-tech equipment over a period of many decades requires the combined forces of numerous experts from a whole range of specialist fields.

A world-class accelerator centre

With over 50 years of experience to its name, DESY is among the world’s leading accelerator centres. Very soon after the research centre was founded, the young and still inexperienced team at DESY was nonetheless able to develop and build one of the most powerful electron synchrotrons of the 1960s. The results achieved with this facility established DESY as one of the top international centres in the field of particle physics. At the same time, it laid the foundations of what would prove to be a second and highly fruitful area of research at DESY: the use of particle accelerators as sources of intense light.

The early 1970s saw the construction of DORIS, one of the world’s first large storage rings, which to this very day still serves as a reliable X-ray source for research teams from around the globe. In its day, the PETRA storage ring was the largest and most powerful electron accelerator in the world. A masterpiece of accelerator design, it put DESY at the very forefront of particle research with electron-positron collisions from 1978 onwards. Today the facility is back in operation as the world’s leading storage ring-based X-ray radiation source.

DESY enjoys a long tradition of international cooperation, not least in the field of accelerator physics. One of the best examples of such collaboration was the construction of the electron-proton storage ring HERA, Germany’s largest research instrument to date, which remained in operation at DESY from 1990 to 2007. All in all, 11 countries were involved in the construction project.

Today, over 50 research institutes from 12 countries are involved, under the leadership of DESY, in the development of the pioneering TESLA technology, which is based on superconducting accelerator elements. The FLASH free-electron laser at DESY is the first facility to make use of this ground-breaking technology.

As one of the world’s leading centres in this field, DESY is ideally positioned to play a key role in current and future international projects, such as the X-ray laser European XFEL, which is currently under construction in the Hamburg area, and the next major project in the world of particle physics, the planned International Linear Collider ILC.