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December 2025 ESRFnews

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N many ways the odds were against it. The new,

state-of-the-art storage ring had to be designed and

installed within the constraints of an existing 20

year-old accelerator tunnel. Once installed, engineers

had less than four months to commission it. And to top

it off, during commissioning the world was hit by a viral

pandemic. Nevertheless, come 25 August 2020 – as

planned an ESRF armed with an Extremely Brilliant

Source EBS went into user service opening a broad

new vista for science in Europe and beyond

In the five years since users have reported a host

of incredible advances The HiPCT technique has

allowed the imaging of entire human organs from

millimetres down to single cells The result is the

beginning of a Human Organ Atlas which is already

yielding insights into diseases from COVID19

to cancer

Meanwhile materials scientists have seized on EBSs

higher flux to create highthroughput Xray screening

of battery electrodes processing thousands of samples

per hour. This type of accelerated discovery is helping

to power the global shift to safer and more efficient

energy storage.

Structural biology research has also gone up a gear.

Serial crystallography can now capture proteins at room

temperature and on the microsecond scale, providing

moving pictures of life’s molecular machinery at work.

Even the Earths hidden depths are now within reach

With bright beams able to probe minuscule samples

under extreme pressure geoscientists can reproduce the

conditions of planetary interiors and track how matter

transforms into previously unknown chemistry

If all this and more has been achieved in just five

years what might the next five bring Lots of ideas

are circulating many of which are being driven by

dedicated hub and BAG access modes On the following

pages ESRFEBS users in different fields share their

visions of the breakthroughs to come

Jon Cartwright

As the ESRF celebrates half a decade of the Extremely Brilliant

Source, users look forward to what will be possible in the next

f ive years.

A user’s guide to

the future

E S R F

FUTURE OF THE EBS