The 8th of July 2021 marked the inauguration of SESAME’s Materials Science (MS) beamline. The Ambassador of Switzerland to Jordan, H.E. Mr. Lukas Gasser, along with members of his embassy team, and UNESCO’s Representative to Jordan, Ms. Min Jeong Kim, were welcomed to the inaugural ceremony by the Director General of SESAME, Professor Khaled Toukan, and the Directors of SESAME.
In his welcoming remarks, Khalid Toukan pointed out that the beamline now allowed the users of SESAME to obtain diffraction data of a quality unparalleled in any laboratory in the region.
The MS beamline is heavily based on the MS X04SA beamline previously in operation at the Swiss Light Source, and its donation to SESAME by the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) has resulted in SESAME having a powerful and extremely precise tool to investigate matter at the micro-, nano- and atomic-scale.
A ribbon officially inaugurating the beamline was cut by H.E. Mr. Lukas Gasser and Professor Khaled Toukan, together with Ms. Min Jeong Kim.
Work on the MS beamline had started in 2015, with the adaptation of the design of the MS X04SA beamline to the characteristics of SESAME’s machine. In 2016, after receiving the donation of another major component, a detector from the Swiss company Dectris, execution of the project was fast-tracked, and the installation phase took place between 2017 and 2019, which is when SESAME received a diffractometer for the beamline as a donation from the Diamond Light Source. Upon sourcing the necessary equipment, the MS beam was first delivered to SESAME’s experimental station at the end of 2019. Fine tuning and characterization of its performance continued during the Covid-19 pandemic, and in December 2020, the beamline started hosting its first users. A first paper utilizing data taken at the MS beamline has already been published in a high-impact journal.
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Image: Cutting the ribbon of the MS Beamline (left to right): the Director General of SESAME, Professor Khaled Toukan, the UNESCO Representative to Jordan Ms. Min Jeong Kim, and the Ambassador of Switzerland to Jordan, H.E. Mr. Lukas Gasser Note: all picture participants are Covid-19 Vaccinated.
Credit: © SESAME 2021