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Cerdanyola del Vallès (Barcelona), 17th November 2021. A grant of 7.5M€ has been awarded to ALBA to start working on the ALBA II upgrade. One of the first actions is hiring five people to start developing the project: two project engineers, one vacuum engineer and two instrumentation specialists.
ALBA II is the project for upgrading the ALBA Synchrotron into a 4th generation light source whose enhanced analytical capabilities will serve the scientific and industrial community to better understand and solve current and future societal challenges.
ALBA II will be crucial in areas like health, climate change or energy, going one step further to better understand complex phenomena such as virus infection processes, the search for drugs, vaccines or treatments. It will be of great help for sustainable agriculture and the preservation of the environment. And it will support the development of materials for the storage, conversion and transport of energy.
The design and construction of ALBA II will cover the period 2021-2028, while maintaining the current operation. Between 2029 and 2030, there will be a technical shutdown to install and commission the new components, restarting the research activity in 2031.
One of the key points of the ALBA upgrade relies on the replacement of several accelerator elements with cutting-edge technologies, which will generate a much smaller electron beam and therefore brighter and more coherent synchrotron light.
The prototyping of such technologies, like the magnetic systems and their power supplies, the vacuum chamber, the superconducting undulator, is the first step for the realization of the upgrade, together with the development of a nano-positioning laboratory, for developing methods and experience to ensure the precision and stability at the level of nanometers needed to take full advantage of the probing capacity of the ALBA II light
This initial funding for starting the ALBA II project is part of the project with reference ICTS-MRR-2021-02-CELLS, funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Union NextGenerationEU / PRTR.
With the collaboration of Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología. The ALBA Synchrotron is part of the of the Unidades de Cultura Científica y de la Innovación (UCC+i) of the FECYT and has received support through the FCT-20-15798 project.
