The 22 October at lunchtime, the first single-bunch electron beam was delivered to the 1.5 GeV storage ring at MAX IV and put to use at the FinEstBeAMS beamline.
These are still preliminary trials and the response from FinEstBeAMS will determine the path forward.
Normally the electrons in the storage rings come in so-called multi-bunch formation. You could think of this as several locomotives with many wagons travelling around the ring. In single-bunch mode, there is only one locomotive “on the track”. The abstract of Christian Strålman’s PhD thesis On the Challenges for Time-of-Flight Electron Spectroscopy at Storage Rings gives a good overview of the topic in Swedish.
The single-bunch mode will give the scientists access to a wider portfolio of measurement techniques in several research areas such as atmospheric chemistry, environmental science (in particular renewable energy sources), molecular reaction dynamics, cluster chemistry and physics, materials science, chemistry–chemical reactions at surfaces or in solution and photocatalysis.
>Read more on the MAX IV website
Image (extract):A screenshot of a scope measurement of the current in the ring, where you can clearly see the strong single-bunch signal. See full image here.