The High-Energy Density (HED) science instrument at European XFEL is dedicated to studies of matter at extreme conditions. Major instrumentation of HED is made available by the user consortium “Helmholtz International Beamline for Extreme Fields (HIBEF)” which is headed by Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden Rossendorf (HZDR) with DESY as a strong partner. HIBEF is part of the Helmholtz International Beamline (HIB) User Consortia that brings cutting edge research capabilities to different instruments at the European XFEL.
One of the drivers envisioned for the HED instrument are Diamond Anvil Cells (DAC) that are dynamically driven, e.g. through pulsed laser heating, isochoric heating or dynamically compressed DACs or a combination thereof. Within the framework of the HIBEF project, DESY organized a first workshop for the DAC community in 2016, to discuss the possible science and technical feasibility of such studies described in a conceptual design report (CDR). As an outcome of this and later workshops, it was agreed that a second interaction area (IA2) could be, in part, dedicated to and optimized for X-ray diffraction experiments. IA2 will increase the capabilities of the multipurpose main interaction area (IA1) of HED that enables both diffraction and spectroscopy experiments. After the above workshops, a team of scientist and engineers at DESY, European XFEL and HZDR worked on developing an experimental setup to conduct the proposed experiments.
In September 2017, the European XFEL started user operation at the two of the six instruments. The HED science instrument is expected to open for first user commissioning experiments in summer 2019. Among the first capabilities are diffraction and spectroscopy experiments in DACs.
From May 2018 until the end of June, European XFEL is expected to open a call for proposals for the HED instrument for this period. In order to inform potential users of the initial capabilities of the different DAC setups at the HED instrument, we are organizing the workshop “Early DAC experiments at the HED Instrument of the European XFEL”. The XFEL management has suggested during the last user meeting that it is highly desirable to submit so called “Community Proposals” by groups of people that have common interest in a particular instrumental setup (including “User Assisted Commissioning”) in order to share the burden and risk of these early experiments. Thus, the workshop is also intended to serve as a vehicle to organize and prepare community proposals for first DAC experiments. Since proposals will be rated on the basis of scientific motivation and technical challenges, it is seen as most advantageous to draft the proposal with a targetable scientific objective in mind. For this reason, we have asked several users from the community that have been actively participating and supporting a DAC setup at the European XFEL to present potential scientific cases for a community proposal. Towards the end of the workshop, we plan to form user groups that will convene in working groups to start drafting the community proposal. In order to make effective use of these breakout sessions, we are limiting the workshop to a maximum of 40 people and we asked each interested user group to send no more than 2 representatives that can speak on behalf of the user group.
The organizing team is looking forward to your contributions.
In order to prepare for the upcoming workshop and to ensure that all have a common understanding of the underlying policies for a community proposal, we recommend that the participants familiarise themselves with the following documents prior to the workshp:
1) To register at the User Portal to the European XFEL (UPEX) use the following link:
https://in.xfel.eu/upex/user/register
2) To familiarize yourself with the XFEL proposal system please use the following link:
https://in.xfel.eu/upex/docs/upex-user-manual.pdf
3) For details on the format of the experiment descriptions please see:
https://in.xfel.eu/upex/docs/xfel_experiment_description
4) Understand the XFEL data policy which applies to all data generated during an experiment campaign see the following document:
upex-scientific-data-policy.pdf
5) Finally for your information the XFEL publication policies:
UN-2018-001_User_Publication_Policy-2.pdf
