Photon Science 2015

For the DESY Photon Science facilities the year 2015 was a major step towards normal user operation after the heavy construction work during the year before. At the free-electron laser FLASH nearly 4500 hours of user operation were offered to the user community. The FLASH II project was officially declared completed after the first beam had been delivered to the new FLASH2 experimental hall “Kai Siegbahn”. Meanwhile, the commissioning of the second free-electron laser (FEL) undulator has made great progress with parallel lasing of both FELs successfully demonstrated. The advantage of gap tuneable undulators was explored for FELs at FLASH2 allowing for a fine-tuning of the lasing process. This resulted in new record values of the achievable single pulse intensities. At present two beamlines at FLASH2 are under construction and first experiments are planned for spring 2016