The new beamline, MIRAS, has been inaugurated in a ceremony held at the ALBA Synchrotron. The event has counted with the presence of the State Secretary for Research, Development and Innovation, Carmen Vela, who highlighted that the infrastructure "is the work and collaboration between the Government of Spain and the Generalitat of Catalonia, which have made possible the creation and expansion of a unique scientific infrastructure in Spain and the most important synchrotron light source of the Mediterranean. A facility that works closely with industry and helps attract and retain top researchers". Arcadi Navarro, Secretary for Universities and Research of the Catalan government, also was present in the event and remarked that ALBA "is an example of  effort, cutting-edge research, collaboration and flexibility". The director of the ALBA Synchrotron, Caterina Biscari, has emphasized that "this is the beginning of the expansion of the infrastructure. Our goal is to launch new beamlines every year to give service to the scientific community."

Devoted to infrared spectroscopy and microscopy, this new beamline is available to public and private researchers from the fields of materials science, biology and biomedicine, geology, archeology or environmental areas, among others. As the responsible of the beamline, Ibraheem Yousef, detailed in his presentation, this new tool helps to detect and quantify molecules and their spatial distribution. Therefore, it is key for defining the chemical composition of the materials at the molecular level.

MIRAS is the first phase-II beamline open at the ALBA Synchrotron. It was initiated in 2014 and, once the installation of the in-tunnel components and the beamline set-up were finished, the commissioning and friendly user experiments started in mid 2016. It has costed one million euros, funded by the ALBA Synchrotron.

The first official experiment was hosted in mid October with researchers from the Institute of Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia (IQAC-CSIC) who used the beamline to analyze how lipid systems fit into the different layers of the skin. The main benefit of this research is to test the effectivity of these lipid systems as carriers of active ingredients to the different skin layers.

This experiment is the first of which will hosting this beamline in 2016 and in the first half of 2017 (whose evaluation experiments is currently performed).