ALBA

ALBA is a 3rd generation synchrotron light facility located at Cerdanyola del Valles, Barcelona, which has currently ten operational state-of-the-art beamlines, two in commissioning and two additional ones in construction. The beamlines cover soft and hard X-rays as well as infrared, and are devoted mainly to research in materials science, condensed matter and biosciences. ALBA is a large research infrastructure producing close to 6000 hours of beamtime per year per beamline and is widely used by the national and international scientific community as well as industrial customers, giving service to more than 2,400 researchers every year. ALBA participates in several European projects and is member of League of European Accelerator-based Photon Sources (LEAPS). The project to upgrade to a 4th generation diffraction-limited source, ALBA II, has recently been launched. ALBA II will host up to four long beamlines with greatly improved coherence and nanofocusing capabilities.

Our contribution to IMPRESS

The ALBA team will be strongly involved in work-package five “In situ, Operando & Correlative” with the design and testing of new MEMS-based micro-reactors for correlative photocatalysis studies of CO2 reduction and for the generation of high value products combining vapour/ gas, heating and electrical biasing under illumination. The micro-reactors will be compatible with TEM as well as synchrotron beamlines for X-ray absorption spectroscopy and x-ray diffraction, in order to achieve structural, chemical and electronic characterization of the same samples under identical experimental conditions.

We will also heavily contribute to work-package seven “Dissemination, Exploitation & Training”, in particular in the organization of a school on correlative and operando experiments in materials science. The school will foster the exchange of expertise among the participants, especially early stage researchers, highlight the power of multi-modal and multi-length scale approaches, and trigger new collaborations.