This year, DESY and European XFEL Users’ Meetings have bust out of its usual auditorium setting and instead made its way to the huge tents of the ‘Kuppel Hamburg’ across the street from DESY. With more than 1100 registered attendees, the Users’ Meetings are taking advantage of this special event venue. On the agenda, under the title of “Research with Synchrotron Radiation and FELs”, over three days (24–26 January) for scientists around the world: the current status and future plans for the European XFEL and for DESY’s light sources PETRA III and FLASH, discussions on science highlights from user experiments, and two large posters sessions. Meanwhile, on the DESY and European XFEL campuses, several satellite workshops have been taking place already since Monday.

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Poster session and industry exhibition in the Hamburg Kuppel at the DESY Photon Science Users´ meeting 2024. Photo: DESY, Wiebke Laasch

“It is a great testimony that our photon science facilities PETRA III/IV, FLASH, and the European XFEL are serving a growing scientific community,” says DESY’s interim Photon Science Director Franz Kärtner. “This meeting, together with its many satellite meetings, is helping to advance the field of X-ray science and technology and its applications in ever more creative and innovative ways.”

Concerning that innovation, many of the 20 total satellite meetings dove into particularly novel subjects. Satellite meetings hosted by DESY include updates on the Extreme Conditions Beamline at PETRA III, community proposals for seeded operation at FLASH, new developments in computing for photon science, and new analytics for battery technologies. European XFEL’s meetings in Schenefeld included topics on the possibilities of plasma wakefield accelerators in photon science experiments and developments in data management.

In addition poster sessions will take place. They are featuring more than registered 340 posters and will be split in two, with the first session focussing on European XFEL, FLASH, theory and other research topics, and the second on PETRA III. Both session will be accompanied by a vendor exhibition with more than 50 exhibitors from different companies.

It is already a long-standing tradition that the representatives of the user organisations, the European Synchrotron and FEL User Organisation (ESUO), the German Committee for Research with Synchrotron Radiation (KFS), and the DESY Photon Science User Committee (DPS-UC) report on the concerns and interests of the community. They represent an interdisciplinary user community with a broad spectrum of research not only at DESY's light sources. What they all have in common is the need for cutting-edge sources for their present and future research.

The User’s Meeting programme will run until the afternoon of 26 January. For more information on presented talks, satellite meetings, posters, and more, please visit https://indico.desy.de/event/41899/