Find the summary and the contents of all sessions
Cerdanyola del Vallès, 30th June Research Infrastructures such as synchrotrons and Free Electron Lasers (FELs) play a crucial role in enabling some of the most significant fundamental scientific and societal challenges of our time to be tackled, and none more challenging than mounting an effective and enduring response to the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020. While much human activity stopped as COVID-19 swept across the world, many facilities developed ways to continue to run to support critical research on the Coronavirus and have provided critical new insights into the structure and function of the virus, and ways to inhibit infection pathways.
The operations of synchrotrons and FELs had to adapt to the constraints of working in a post-COVID-19 world, first to ensure that they could provide essential services for research on the virus, safely and reliably and then in the longer term provide facilities for a much wider range of research. Given that the challenges and likely solutions were mostly common across these infrastructures it is logical and highly desirable that they should share best practices and work together as much as possible towards common solution, be it through the development of new policies, practices and technologies. Within Europe the most obvious and effective way to co-ordinate this would be through LEAPS, the League of European Accelerator-based Photon Sources, and the first action of LEAPS was to organise a webinar to explore key challenges for its Members to restore the fullest possible level of operations for its tens of thousands of users in universities and industry as quickly and effectively as possible.
The event, held on June 15th 2020, focused on three areas: minimising risks to the safety of staff and users; development of a wider range of services for remote users; effective engagement with a user community that may be less free to travel for some considerable time to come. The meeting started with a plenary session in which representatives of three LEAPS Members outlined the current status of their facility, the challenges of the getting there and the greatest challenges they face in the future. This was following by three breakout sessions in the areas outlined above, each of which had a panel for discussion of points set by a facilitator while the wider audience of attendees could also submit questions. The conclusions of each session were then presented in a final plenary session by rapporteurs from the breakout session.
