Travel Alongside A 3.4 km Long X-Ray Laser, In Less Than 5 Minutes

Enjoy the European XFEL tunnel flight film

In a new tunnel flight film, you can glide through the 3.4-km length of the European XFEL, an X-ray laser being constructed for research in the metropolitan Hamburg area. From one end of the facility to the other, you’ll get an impression of not only its massive scope, but also the ongoing work in the tunnels: building a facility that will produce ultrashort and ultrabright X-ray laser flashes, helping scientists watch chemical reactions as they happen, elucidate complex biological structures, and uncover the secrets of extreme states of matter such as those found inside planets.

The film starts beneath the campus of the research centre DESY in the European XFEL injector, which has been operating since December and is the source of the electrons from which the X-ray laser flashes will be generated. Then you’ll fly into the 1.7 km long superconducting particle accelerator that will bring the electrons to extremely high energies. You can see a large amount of work happening along the length of the accelerator, with scientists and engineers doing tests and securing connections between the yellow accelerator modules. The strong electromagnets after the accelerator will give the beam of electrons its final shape.

After the first branching of the tunnel at the Osdorfer Born site, you’ll see the first complete undulator, a more than 200 m long alternating array of magnets. The undulator was installed earlier this year and will generate the X-ray flashes from the accelerated electrons. At the end of the undulator, the pipes containing the electron and X-ray beams separate, and you’ll follow first one and then—after branching by a mirror—two X-ray beamlines all the way to the experiment hutch. Along the way, scientists and engineers work on installing vacuum systems, diagnostics, and optics. In the hall, the film ends at the hutch of one of the first two scientific instruments, FXE.

The new tunnel flight film is available on the European XFEL YouTube channel along with many other videos about the facility’s construction and its research goals. Keep an eye on new releases as European XFEL prepares to open its doors for scientists around the world in 2017.