10th Year of Aichi Synchrotron Radiation Center
It is tenth year of operation for Aichi Synchrotron Radiation Center(Aichi SR) in 2022. With strong support of Aichi Prefecture, Universities, government and industries, it was established and has been operated smoothly and successfully under the leadership of the former director, Dr. Yoshikazu Takeda.
Number of beam lines evolved from 6 in 2013 to 12 in 2022. 8 beamlines were constructed by the Aichi Science & Technology Foundation, one by Aichi Prefecture, one by Nagoya University in addition to 2 industry-owned beamlines. Ten beam lines are offered to general users for 4 hours in one shift, two shifts per day and 4 days a week. In total, the used beam time also has been increasing from 4283 hours in 2013 to 8557 hours in 2020. Now 80-90 % of available beam time is used. 51% of user time was for industries, 39% for academia including industry-academia collaborations in 2020.
Since one of the original purposes of Aichi SR was the application science and developments by industries in the area, Aichi SR provided with coordinators and beam line staffs to help new users in various areas of science research and development. Major areas of users are automobile and related developments, semiconductor devices, material science, chemistry and so on. In addition, food, healthcare, fiber, ceramics are new areas of application of Aichi SR. Some of impressive results are presented in seminars and annual symposia.
Measurement acting support is also available. Samples mailed from users are measured by beamline staff members according to the measuring process and conditions discussed beforehand. It worked out especially under the COVID-19 situation not to stick the research and developments in Japan, where the move from area to area was prohibited.
After nine years of operation, it becomes frequent to find malfunctions and problematic incidences of the light source and beamline systems. We are considering not only renewal but also update of the systems in order to improve the quality of data for better science research and industrial developments of this area. Advice and requests are very welcomed from researchers and users for the coming second decade of Aichi SR.
January 2022
Hideyo Kunieda