Synchrotron of Trieste, where light is made

This text is part of the Italian Tech album “In search of a better future”, on newsstands with Repubblica on May 4th.

They call it Presnitz and it is a dessert vaguely similar to strudel that is still served in the historic bars of the city. At Caffè San Marco, which has remained as it was at the time of its opening in 1914, they have been offering it for over a century. A legacy of the long Austrian domination. “But this is the Naples of the north”, explains a gentleman in his fifties leaning against the counter, implying that at the end of the Teutonic there are sweets. “The rhythms are relaxed,” he adds, glass of white in hand. At five in the afternoon the bars and wine bars of Trieste they are filled in an indispensable daily ritual, as probably also happened in the days of the irredentists and James Joyce who were at home at the San Marco. Some establishments are from Trieste, others from Friuli or Veneto and although the difference may escape those who come from outside, for those who live here it is substantial. In and out of the city, it doesn’t take much to change climate, culture and time.
Climbing the Karst plateau, ten kilometers away from the city centre, one enters, for example, the near future of the‘Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste and its two particle accelerators. The first ring is called Electrathe other instead, Fermi is linear. Born in 1986, they work there 400 people and is attended every year by over a thousand scientists from 50 countries. From the 1980s it retains the worn look between concrete, glass and aluminum, but in the end what matters is what it contains: a research structure essential for Italy, with an international committee that examines the proposals for experiments that come from all over the world by deciding whether or not to give access to laboratories. Free access if the proposed research is judged valid, but in that case both the experiment and the results become public. Or you pay, like private individuals who don’t want to divulge the object of investigation and least of all what comes out of the experiments.

“Chemistry, biology, new structural and functional materials, biomedicine, electronics… This is a multidisciplinary center” tells Alfonso Franciosi, head of Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste. Roman by birth, a past at the University of Minnesota where there is a department of chemical engineering and materials science among the best in the world, he returned to Italy in 2014 and today, in addition to directing Elettra, he is a professor of physics at the University of Trieste. “All advanced countries have at least one accelerator like Elettra or Fermi”, he continues.

The relationship with the CERN accelerator in Geneva is distant. Inside Fermi and Elettra particles do not collide but intense beams of light are created and the various experiments use certain spectra, from ultraviolet to X-rays, according to needs.

To give an idea of ​​the power compared to a hospital X-ray, when produced by Elettra it is ten billion times brighter. Fermi’s is in the order of billions of billions of times. There are about twenty similar particle accelerators in Europe and those who don’t have them use those of others for their research, as do Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovenia when they come here to Trieste. Without similar centres, the pharmaceutical industry would be the first to find itself in great difficulty because it is in these structures that the molecules of new drugs are studied. England, France, Spain, Sweden, Poland, Belgium have their own. The Germans are the only ones who own two.

“In a recent experimental project with the Cattinara Hospital here in Trieste, we did some x-rays using one of Elettra’s workstations on patients with the risk of tumors in areas of the body that traditional methods fail to identify”, underlines Franciosi. “Obviously such a large-scale solution is not feasible, each X-ray costs a lot, but it has helped improve research in that field with the hope that one day we will be able to have tools derived from the accelerator that are much more precise than those currently used in healthcare. Such intense light rays allow measurements on a material or a molecule that with other light sources would require infinite timestherefore not even allowing to observe its evolution”.

Being a non-profit and a European research institution, Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste can carry out commercial activities but it must be residual, otherwise it would fall back as state aid to industry. From here anyway sometimes new devices and solutions developed during the experiments come out and are sold externally with earnings of around two or three million euros on a total budget exceeding fifty-six million. It is a consortium joint-stock company whose major shareholders are all public bodies, starting with Area Science Park, i.e. the Scientific and Technological Research Area of ​​Trieste, the Friuli-Venezia Giulia Region, the Cnr and Invitalia, an acronym for National Agency for the attraction of investments and business development. Like the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), which is however a foundation, Sincrotrone Trieste was also created under a private legal regime.

The initial idea was to guarantee more autonomy, which however over time was partially reduced despite the strategic uniqueness.
“Inside the Electra ring, electrons travel at nearly the speed of light, the beam is made to bend from its trajectory by two magnets and in the deflection it loses energy. It is from that residue that a beam of photons, the synchrotron light, is emitted, destined for the experimental stations“, explains Lisa Vaccarias he accompanies us along the outside of the ring he has diameter of 80 meters, where the laboratories follow one after the other. She is a chemist born in Veneto a few kilometers away from Trieste and who graduated in Trieste starting immediately to work at the Sincrotrone, she is the coordinator of the beamlines and laboratories of the Ideas Group. In total there are 28 laboratories, six of these managed by the Cnr, others used by institutes of various European countries, still others by private individuals. They exploit light with a very broad spectrum ranging from infrared to ultraviolet up to high-energy X-rays, to conduct experiments in very different fields.
“A colorful humanity passes by here”, jokes Vaccari. “Biologists, chemists, doctors, physicists, who they use the photon as a sort of microscope to investigate matter by understanding the arrangement of atoms in space and therefore the internal structure of what is being analyzed. Anticancer drugs, study of viruses, new materials for textiles as well as for electronics and nanoelectronics, new alloys, cutting-edge braking systems for vehicles, photovoltaic cells, microprocessors… And cultural heritage obviously, which is one of the fields that has been added recently. Here we studied several Stradivarius, including the “Toscano” from the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. We gave them a sort of computerized axial tomography, a Tac, but with such a high resolution as to understand if the wood was deformed, if the instrument had been repaired, exactly how and where and with what materials. But above all what Antonio Stradivari used in the seventeenth century to fill the pores of the wood before applying the varnish. 70 percent of the time of those who work here is used to support the research chosen by the panel of international experts or that of private companies”.

Now 170 million euros will be spent on upgrade the ring and another 29 to adjust the energy infrastructure. Elettra is considered a third-generation machine, among a class of accelerators for creating light that use two magnets to bend the beam. Elettra 2 will use six magnets curves for each research station. In Switzerland they are doing a similar operation with seven magnets, while in the United States they aim for nine. The electrons traveling at the speed of light inside the ring proceed in a straight line for some stretches and then are made to bend by the magnets. The more magnets you have in the curve, the less the quality of the light emitted degrades. The electron beam can therefore be smaller and better controlled, resulting in even more brightness. This allows for higher resolution. Using a metaphor, it is as if a higher number of pixels of increasingly minute dimensions were used to reproduce an image. However, there is a limit to the number of magnets that can be used. It is in fact on the straight section that the research stations open, consequently if the beam were to curve continuously there would be no space to open the lines which then lead to the research stations. In Switzerland, where they have chosen to have seven curve magnets, they will have fewer research stations than in Trieste, which will have six. In fact, Elettra will go from the current twenty-eight to thirty-two, with an even brighter ray than the current one.
Of fourth generation machines in operation, there is one in Grenoble in France and one in Sweden. The one in Trieste, the one in Switzerland and another in Great Britain will soon follow. All three are interventions on third generation accelerators. The problem is that the makeover of the ring was decided in 2017, when inflation was 1% and now it is 10, with materials having increased by 30%. Not forgetting the energy cost doubled. All accelerators are in the same situation, with bills already high in the past that have become stellar to the point of pushing them to reduce the number of experiments. Trieste, in normal years, spends 8 million euros on electricity alone.
Stop instead, costing 160 million euros, it is not a ring but a straight line of more than 300 meters. Produces an incredibly bright beam but only allows one experiment at a time for six experimental stations. It is a free-electron laser, a free-electron laser (Fel) and in Europe there are 14 in 9 countries. The Fermi impulse has the power comparable to the capacity of a nuclear power plant, but it is very short, on the order of ten millionths of billionths of a second, or femtoseconds. What it is used to observe very rapid phenomenasuch as the exchange of electrons between two atoms. So if with Elettra you look at the initial and final state of a material, with Fermi you can photograph the transitions starting with intermediate chemical reactions and all non-equilibrium states of matter. The FELs, therefore, are complementary to accelerators like Elettra, but more expensive given that the enormous power is then exploited by a smaller number of experiments.
“There are other Fel around the world, but the one in Trieste is one of a kind,” he explains Claudius Masciovecchio, physicist from Abruzzo, manager for Fermi’s temporally resolved experimental techniques. “All thanks to the process of formation of the electron packets that lead to the formation of light rays. This means that it has a much greater precision. Of course, in other countries the Fel is perhaps 3 km long and not 300 meters as here. But the precision it’s just not the same.”
Despite precision and power, and the fourth European Research Council Advanced Grant (ERC) won in seven years, given to Professor Majed Chergui’s project focused on X-ray spectroscopy of chiral molecules in liquid, the Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste is however little known, much to the regret of those who work there. Searching on Wikipedia, in fact, one comes across a skimpy page and the official site only partially helps to understand its centrality and the applications of the searches that are made within it. In the end, it almost seems like a mirror of the city of Trieste, with its strengths between the past and the future that are not always known from the outside. Including the pastries left by the Austrians that the historic cafés still serve.