PSI

At the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI in Villigen, Switzerland, researchers together with the company VACUUMSCHMELZE have built a room whose walls dampen any external magnetic influence by a hundred thousand times. The 25 cubic metre chamber is the world's best large magnetically shielded  room . An experiment to be installed inside  will help to clarify a fundamental question: Why does matter - and thus why do we - exist at all?

Operando X-ray spectrotomography allows scientists to look inside of functioning chemical reactors. A research team at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), at Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France have employed this method successfully.

It is necessary to prepare now for the planned upgrade of the Swiss Light Source SLS. In order to do justice to future research, Alun Ashton is estimating the amount of data that future experiments will produce.

At the X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL of the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, the second beamline is currently being put into operation. With Athos, researchers want to understand how catalysts work or how biomolecules cause hereditary diseases.

In view of the coronavirus pandemic, the Paul Scherrer Institute changed to the extraordinary situation in spring 2020. By then, only a maximum of 20 percent of all PSI employees work at PSI. Five pictures show how research and operations at PSI nevertheless continued.