PSI

Safely packed in a sturdy wooden crate, a high-tech component from PSI has begun its journey to Australia. The device was in use at PSI for more than ten years – now, with the commissioning of the Swiss X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL, it has reached the end of its service life and will be given a new task at the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne.

It has recently been supposed that humans could trace their ancestry back to a strange microscopic creature with a mouth and no anus. Thanks to analysis of 500 million year old fossils at the Swiss Light Source SLS, we can be relieved to find out this is not true: Saccorhytus is not a deuterostome like us, but an ecdysozoan. The findings, published today in Nature, make important amendments to the early phylogenetic tree and our understanding of how life developed.

Where do the many workpieces and components needed for complex scientific experiments at PSI actually come from? They certainly cannot be ordered on the Internet. Some are produced in PSI’s large workshops as part of long-term planning. Many essential components such as mountings for samples, heating structures or vacuum feedthroughs are also produced more or less on demand by technical staff such as those working in PSI’s own dedicated small workshop: Kleinwerkstatt Ost.

The new pharmaceutical laboratory for the manufacture of radiopharmaceuticals at PSI is ready for production. With its three state-of-the-art production units, novel and innovative drugs can be brought rapidly into clinical use.

PSI and ETH Zurich have co-founded the Quantum Computing Hub, where top researchers work together on concepts for quantum computers. One day these machines should comfortably outperform conventional computers in certain computing tasks.