30 years of ESRF users: Pioneering science

Thirty years ago, just one day after its official inauguration on 30 September 1994, the first users came to the ESRF to begin their experiments. Since then, the ESRF has contributed to over 40,000 publications and four Nobel Prizes, driving the frontiers of science across numerous fields.

Among the first users was Jean Daillant, the new ESRF director general. “When I first came as a user to the ESRF, back in 1994, it was a unique place to carry out experiments we could only have imagined before, and this experience definitely shaped my career”, explains Daillant.

During these three decades, the ESRF users have been coming onsite with ever more complex scientific questions to answer, while the scientists, engineers and technicians in-house have made use of their creativity to implement the best set-ups to achieve what one day seemed unachievable.

Long-term user and former member of the Science Advisory Committee Moshe Deutsch, professor at Bar-Ilan University (Israel), explains the importance of this collaboration: “Suggestions coming from the users to the beamline scientists and up to the committees and management, i.e. bottom up, along with the combined expertise of the users and the staff, are, and have always been at the ESRF, the seeds of new directions for science, for instrumentation and for beamlines”. 

The number of proposals throughout these years has increased exponentially: In 1995, there were 792 proposals. In 2024, there were a total of 2200. Joanne McCarthy, head of the User Office, explains how the beamtime proposals have become more sophisticated: “Today scientists need to get a full picture of a scientific question, and thanks to EBS and the different access modes, there is an increasing number of proposals that include experiments using complementary techniques and with teams including different expertise”.  An example of this is the Human Organ Atlas Hub, where interdisciplinary groups made of doctors, physicists and engineers join forces to provide unprecedented insights into our bodies in health, ageing and disease.

Pioneering research

Back in 1994, the ESRF was one of the very first 3rd generation synchrotrons and could provide higher flux than previously built machines, which allowed several fields to really take off.

One of the clearest examples is structural biology, which was already popular in the early days (1/3 of the proposals submitted), leading to several Nobel Prize laureates from the user community.

“The ESRF is the facility where we collected our best data. This is where we did our real science,” said Ada Yonath, winner of the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2009. And Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel prize winner in chemistry in 2009 and President of the Royal Society, added: “The ESRF was an essential ingredient of our work on the structure of the ribosome. I think when you have a large international facility, you can do things on a scale that is not possible by just one country. The ESRF, because it has been international, has brought top scientists together from different countries, and this has led to a lot of pioneering ideas.”

Throughout the years, cryo macromolecular crystallography became a key success of structural biology, but a significant limitation is that the crystals were not in their natural environment. Today, thanks to EBS, the ESRF offers room-temperature serial crystallography, which enables the capture of crystal structures in conformations closer to ‘native’ conditions, allowing scientists to follow reactions in real-time. These new capabilities are very relevant for the design of new drugs and biotechnological applications.

Another field where the ESRF was a pioneer is paleontology. The first experiments were carried out in the year 2000 by Paul Tafforeau, PhD student at the time, when José Baruchel, in charge of the X-ray microtomography beamline, gave him the chance to scan some fossil teeth. “Until then I had used destructive methods, which are not convenient for unique specimens like fossils”, explains Tafforeau, who is now in charge of BM18. “Every time I had beamtime it felt like a whole new world opened up”.

The ESRF soon became the referent for research in paleontology, where the oldest sample scanned are 2.8 billion year old bacteria. In the beginning, the sizes of the samples were no more than 1-2 cm, which increased to 16cm when the first scan of a hominid brain took place. Today, with the new BM18 and the EBS higher coherence and energy than previously, paleontologists will be able to scan 250 cm tall samples weighing around 300kg.

Long-term users: a journey from ESRF to EBS

Over the years, the ESRF has built a vibrant and strong community of users, among which long-term users who, after being the first to use the ESRF in 1994, became the first to use the new capabilities of EBS. Leonid Dubrovinsky was one of them.

With his team, they went from experiments with the pressure corresponding to upper parts of Earth lower mantle (~30 GPa, depth ~800 km) and no heating options to being able to carry out experiments at terapascal pressure range (about 3 times of the pressure in the centre of Earth or the interiors of giant planets) with in situ laser heating to reproduce conditions in the entire Earth interior. Dubrovinsky has a very clear vision about the future matter at extremes with EBS: “What I expect to see in the close future is time-resolved in situ high-temperature experiments at multimegabar pressures. We know that such option will bring completely new chemistry, but expect also novel physics and discovery phenomena important for geo and planetary sciences”.

Another long-term user of the ESRF is Alain Manceau, among the first in 1994 and who is currently an ERC Advance Grant awardee with a project focused on the EBS capabilities. His research is centered on molecular environmental sciences and has evolved with the progress on detection of materials. “I’ve always found the ESRF scientists ready to take up the challenges we’ve brought to them”, says Manceau. “They would ‘push the envelope’ to get the projects off the ground”, he adds.

Manceau studies, among others, mercury, but in the early days it could only be studied on surrogate materials because the detection limit of XANES/EXAFS at the time was not low-enough to measure natural samples. At the same time, the resolution in energy was not high enough to distinguish the key mercury species from their spectral signature.

Today, identifying mercury species in natural samples is possible by HERFD-XAFS thanks to the development of a new generation of detectors (i.e., crystals analysers) with high detection efficiency (lower detection limit) and high energy resolution, on beamlines such as ID26 and ID24. “A main advantage of the EBS for molecular environmental sciences is the reduction of the spot size on the sample, which allows one to peer into the heterogeneous world of natural materials with higher spatial resolution”, concludes Manceau.

The Directors of Research, Gema Martinez-Criado and Michael Krisch, state:  “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. This commitment has been at the heart of the ESRF's success over the past 30 years and continues to shape its future.”