ESRF News December 2024

NEWS

December 2024 ESRFnews

User Meeting organisers

welcome registrants

Registration is open for next year’s

ESRF User Meeting. Held from 10 to

12 February 2025 at the site of the

ESRF, the EPN Campus in Grenoble,

France, the event is an opportunity

for anyone to find out more about

world-class synchrotron radiation, to

build networks, or to gather ideas for

an experimental proposal before the

March deadline.

Following the traditional format, the

first day of the meeting will be filled

with tutorials, on subjects ranging from

X-ray techniques to beamline control

tools and data optimisation. On the

second day, a plenary session will see

four keynote speakers, the directors’

science and facility reports, posters

and the annual Young Scientist Award.

Finally, the third day will be devoted

to microsymposia, on the topics of

“Tomography in and for structural

biology” and “Innovative materials for

a greener future”.

According to the ESRF User

Organisation Committee, attendance

is worth it “whether you’re a seasoned

ESRF user or a newcomer”. The ESRF

continues to push the boundaries of

scientific research and technological

innovation driven by the unparalleled

capabilities of the Extremely Bright

Source it states on the event website

The User Meeting just a few weeks

before the March 2025 proposal

submission deadline is an opportunity

to hear about the stimulating research

carried out to showcase your own

research and to participate in tutorials

and practicals designed to help you

best exploit your ESRF data

C O P Y R I G H T B R U N O L A V I T

ESRF celebrates 30 years of user

experiments

Staff and users celebrated three

decades of ESRF user operations at

the beginning of October. Towards

the end of September, just a week

before the actual 30th anniversary,

the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet

of the European Space Agency sent a

gift from orbit – a photo of the ESRF

taken aboard the International Space

Station (below).

When ESRF experiments began,

on 1 October 1994, the facility

offered 15 state-of-the-art beamlines

delivering X-rays from a new, third-

generation synchrotron source.

Since then, it has contributed to over

40,000 publications and four Nobel

prizes, driving the frontiers of science

across numerous fields.

Today, the ESRF is again pioneering

a new era of scientific possibilities

with the fourth-generation Extremely

Brilliant Source.

“The ESRF’s mission remains as

strong as ever: advancing scientific

knowledge, pioneering synchrotron

technology, promoting international

collaboration, and training the next

generation of scientists to address key

societal challenges,” said the ESRF

directors of research, Gema Martínez-

Criado and Michael Krisch, in a

joint statement. “This commitment

has been at the heart of the ESRF’s

success over the past 30 years and

continues to shape its future.”

The ESRF is clearly

visible from space

in a photo taken

from on board the

International Space

Station.

E U R O P E A N S P A C E A G E N C Y-

Unsafe battery features exposed

Scientists have used dark-field X-ray

microscopy (DFXM) at the ESRF

to show, for the first time, that the

formation of dangerous “dendrites” in a

promising solid-state battery electrolyte

is preceded by crystal dislocations. The

result could help in the design of safer

rechargeable batteries.

Dendrites are branch-like metallic

filaments formed by excess lithium,

and are known to be able to short

circuit batteries leading to their

catastrophic failure Because they are

believed to be most common in liquid

electrolytes the battery industry

now has its eyes on solid alternatives

Studying dendrite formation in these

is tricky via conventional techniques

such as transmission electron

microscopy however as samples have

to be the thickness of foil

As the scientists at the Norwegian

University of Science and Technology

NTNU have discovered DFXM

can be a better alternative, as it can

reveal strain and orientation states

directly in 3D in bulk samples, with

nanometre resolution and a field

of view of hundreds of microns.

Working with the ESRF, the scientists

were able to see dislocations in the

immediate vicinity of dendrite tips

in the promising solid electrolyte

(LLZO), including

one instance where a dislocation

was anchored directly to a tip

suggesting an interplay between

dendrite proliferation and dislocation

formation Nat Commun 15 8207

Although the researchers do not

yet know how to restrict dendrite

formation they believe further DFXM

studies during battery operation could

point the way If we can tune down the

dislocation directions we can maybe

tweak the dendrites propagation says

Daniel Rettenwander one of the team

members at the NTNU

“Although the

researchers do

not yet know

how to restrict

dendrite

formation, they

believe further

DFXM studies

during battery

operation could

point the way