Spanish technology for the European XFEL, the world’s most important scientific X-ray facility

• The European XFEL centre offers the international scientific community a premier facility for research into structures and processes at the atomic and nanometric scale. It employs the world’s longest and most powerful superconducting linear accelerator.
• ARQUIMEA and CIEMAT collaborate in the manufacture of 14 new quadrupole movers, high-precision systems that position the electromagnets tasked with analysing and correcting the trajectory of the laser beam across the scientific facility.

Madrid, 19 November 2024.

ARQUIMEA, a technology company that operates globally in technically demanding sectors, and the Centre for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research (CIEMAT), deliver 14 new quadrupole movers to the European XFEL scientific facility, the world’s most powerful X-ray accelerator, located in Schenefeld-Hamburg, Germany.

The European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser Facility (European XFEL) is a research centre for X-ray lasers that was commissioned in 2017. This international project involves 12 countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. The facility is located in the German states of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein.

The European XFEL is a facility at the forefront of global scientific research. It represents significant progress in the ability of scientists to investigate phenomena at the atomic and molecular level with unprecedented precision, to explore new frontiers in materials science, biology, chemistry and physics, among other disciplines.

Javier Munilla, a scientist at CIEMAT explains, ‘the European XFEL can act as a super microscope with an ultra-slow motion video camera, providing advanced information on how a cell reacts with a virus, how a protein develops, including details on individual molecules and their chemical reactions with each other’.

The facility consists of a network of tunnels more than 3.4 km long divided into 3 main parts: an electron gun, an accelerator and an undulator array, to create an X-ray free-electron laser with unique characteristics. The gun generates the electrons; the accelerator propels those electrons at high speeds, which are distributed in laser-like light within its undulators to produce the X-rays. These undulators consist of 5-metre-long magnet arrays with intersections between them.

It is at these intersections that the high-precision movers are installed, which support the magnetic quadrupoles tasked with correcting the trajectory of the laser beam across the facility.

The quadrupole movers (QM) must provide a path length of 3 mm in two different axes with sub-micrometre repeatability and support the 75 kg of the electromagnets. That is, the movers or tables must have the capability to move to the same position several times with a minimum deviation of less than one micrometre (70 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair). These tables allow the position of the magnets to be adjusted with great repeatability, ensuring that the electron beam maintains its course without significant deviations.

‘This complex project showcases the success of the cooperation of the scientific community and the industrial sector, as well as the strength of the Spanish industrial fabric, which is well qualified to supply complex equipment for such demanding high technology sectors’.

Emilio Ramiro, Business Development Director of the Science Industry Division at ARQUIMEA, highlights: ‘ At ARQUIMEA we collaborate with scientists and researchers in the development and industrialisation of their technologies and projects, using our facilities, experience and engineering, manufacturing and testing capabilities, to create complex systems of high value for our society’.

Seven years after the inauguration of the European XFEL facility, ARQUIMEA and CIEMAT have once again collaborated with this research centre by manufacturing 14 new quadrupole movers. This equipment has the same configuration, design and operational capabilities that have worked successfully from the outset and will be part of the new undulators that the centre plans to install to increase experimental capabilities.

Successful cooperation between science and industry

In 2015, ARQUIMEA and CIEMAT manufactured and delivered 49 quadrupole movers to the European XFEL facility, which were installed at the facility and have been operating successfully since 2017. The accelerator has a total of 101 movers, plus these 14 new units.

ARQUIMEA was tasked with the manufacture, integration, testing and validation of the systems, as well as the CE marking, in close collaboration with CIEMAT as the institution responsible for the design. The company boasts a high level of expertise in the construction and assembly of complex systems and has been cooperating for decades with research centres and scientific facilities all over the world.

The equipment delivered were designed and manufactured according to the highest quality and safety standards required by the European XFEL. Few companies have the capability to undertake mass production of this kind due to the high precision that such equipment demands.

The world’s most powerful X-ray facility

The European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser (European XFEL) is a scientific facility that was commissioned in 2017 in Schenefeld-Hamburg, Germany, and is capable of generating high-intensity X-ray flashes. Thanks to its extraordinary features, unique in the world, the facility is opening up completely new research opportunities for scientists and industrial users, from mapping atomic details of viruses, filming chemical reactions to studying processes deep inside planets.

The facility consists of a network of tunnels more than 3.4 km long. The accelerator consists of 128 two-metre tubes lined up in a row. The undulator array consists of 18 five-metre undulators aligned with 560 magnets.

The X-ray flashes generated at the facility have very special characteristics for three reasons: their pulses are extremely fast (27,000 times per second); they have a very pure monochromatic wavelength; and they are very powerful (their brightness is 1 billion times higher than that of the best conventional X-ray radiation sources). The electrons are guided and packed into a size of 50 microns, and the light produced can be focused on a spot as small as 11nm (11 millionths of a millimetre).