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F A C T S A N D F I G U R E S
User Operation
2021 saw the gradual return of users to the ESRF to carry out their experiments onsite, although the COVID-19 pandemic continued to significantly disrupt the user programme. Users from several countries were still not able to travel to France, and beam time availability was reduced to allow beamline staff to cope with running mainly remote (staff-assisted) experiments in the first half of the year.
In 2021/I, 35% of the new proposals accepted for the period could not be carried out due to a further national lockdown and a reduction of user service mode (USM) operation from six days to four days per week to help beamline and support staff cope with the intense workload associated with carrying out experiments for users. Ongoing travel restrictions also meant that a number of proposals requiring the presence of the user team onsite could not be carried out. These proposals were carried over to 2021/II, resulting in reduced available beam time for new proposals in that period. To avoid continuous carry-over of proposals affected by the pandemic, and to protect available beam time for new projects, starting from operation year 2022 (beginning 1st March 2022), proposals that could not be done due to the pandemic in 2020 or 2021 will be cancelled and not rescheduled in 2022. Over the full operating year 2021, beam time availability was reduced by only 15% thanks to a largely undisrupted second half-year scheduling period.
Three new or refurbished beamlines opened for users during 2021. The fully refurbished ID27 beamline for high- pressure studies took its first user experiment in November
2021, while the energy-dispersive branch and online High Power Laser Facility (HPLF) of the newly refurbished ID24 beamline for high-brilliance X-ray absorption spectroscopy saw its first users in December. The new French CRG beamline for biological macromolecule diffraction (FIP2) on BM07 took its first users in October.
Figure 155 shows the number of applications for beam time received since 2014. In 2021, three pilot proposals for new community-access modes were implemented, comprising two block allocation group (BAG) proposals ( Museum BAG for structural analysis of historical materials from the heritage science community; Shock BAG for the study of materials under rapid and extreme loading) and a HUB proposal gathering a collaboration of researchers working on battery research. In addition, since 2020, six cryo-electron microscope (cryo-EM) BAGs have been created to group the requests of regular users of the cryo- EM and to replace the submission of individual proposals per project. These block allocation or consortium-based- access proposals group around 100 standard proposals, with the aim of allowing the relevant community to assess and choose the most important and impactful samples to measure and projects to carry out, and bringing the number of proposals submitted to a more manageable level.
Proposals for experiments are selected and beam time allocations are made via peer review by 12 committees, called Beam Time Allocation Panels (BTAPs), composed of specialists mainly from the ESRF member and associate member countries. These panels review proposals for a subset of beamlines. The scientific areas of the ESRF research activities reviewed by these 12 panels are shown in Table 6.
Fig. 155: Numbers of applications for beam time, experimental sessions and user visits, 2014 to 2021. N.B., 2021 experiment and user visit figures are up to 31 December 2021, they do not include the experiments that will continue to be scheduled in the remainder of 2021/II.