The Members of SESAME have recently approved a Five-Year Strategic Plan that sets their vision and goals for the Center during the next five years (2024-2028).
SESAME now has five operational beamlines, three that have been hosting users for a few years and two that have come on stream this year. A sixth is under construction. The Center has a 48-room Guest House where it may accommodate users and a solar power plant that covers all the energy needs of the accelerators, beamlines and SESAME building.
It has an ever-increasing number of registered users (currently 1,538) and if one adds the one call for proposals issued in 2016, 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2022, as well as those received for the first call in 2023, this amounts to a total of 572 proposals. Of these, 294 had been approved.
At today’s date, there are 84 articles that have appeared in peer-review publications for experiments carried out at the three beamlines that have been in operation for a few years, and the average scientific impact factor of the journals in which these papers have been published is 5.4, with 25% of them being in journals having an impact factor greater than 7.
In other words, SESAME has now entered a more user-oriented phase of its evolution. This makes the setting up of sample preparation infrastructures to allow users to take full advantage of the beamlines a priority, and essential upgrades to some of the operational beamlines a must, as well as improvements to the accelerators to enhance machine reliability and performance and beam availability and stability of prime importance. It also makes the setting in place of a series of support laboratories to assist users in carrying out their studies and support the research conducted at the beamlines, as well as an upgrade of the optics for the BM02-IR (Infrared) spectromicroscopy beamline, new focusing optics for the BM08-XAFS/XRF (X-ray Absorption Fine Structure/X-ray Fluorescence) spectroscopy beamline, and the establishment of a pool of sample environment systems to meet the users’ demands crucial. For the moment, three support laboratories are envisaged. They are a ChemLab, MatLab and BioLab. It further makes the installation of a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) and diesel generator for SESAME’s security system and emergency lights, and renovation of the fire alarm system mandatory infrastructure upgrades.
All this is envisaged in what is referred to in the Strategic Plan as Category A activities, in other words, activities that are critical for the sustainability of SESAME’s activity that need to be implemented during the period of the Strategic Plan in order to consolidate the existing beamlines and implement the gaps in the Scientific, Technical and Administrative Sectors. Funding to the amount of US$5.908M is required for these activities. This is divided as follows: US$4.350M for the Scientific Sector, US$1.333M for the Technical Sector and US$0.225M for the Administrative Sector.
Read more on the SESAME website