PhotonDiag 2020 online workshop

The 5th FELs OF EUROPE conference on photon diagnostics, instrumentation and beamline design, was planned to take place at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, from 26 to 28 October 2020.
Due to Covid-19 constrains, the Photondiag 2020 was carried out in virtual format and held as a Zoom conference.
The conference format provided a mix of life and pre-recorded talks, poster presentations, and online workshop sessions, attended by live participants. More than 200 participants from countries all over the world registered for the conference and a lot of daily attendance made it a great success. More than 30 contributions - distributed into twelve sessions - covered topics in the field of photon diagnostics, ranging from new devices for online measurements to data processing, new experimental challenges, and future developments for next generation X-ray light sources.
After the inspiring ‘Welcome Words' of PSI Photon Science Division Head Gabriel Aeppli the conference started with presentations of the facility overviews. The rapidly evolving status of the FEL-facilities worldwide gives a rich impression on how lively and active the field is. Related to the session topics eight invited talks were selected by the program committee. Contributions on spatial, temporal, and spectral pulse properties with emphasis on single shot diagnostics and coherence properties may summarise the first two days of the conference. In addition, new achievements in the detector development for photon diagnostics were presented. Related to photon diagnostic at synchrotrons, the topics of beam position monitoring and the effect of optical vibrations were discussed. Attosecond pulse characterisation was pointed out to be highly relevant for photon diagnostic in the context of new experimental methods. The final session topic of the conference dealt with scientific computing and management of high volume data. The next day this was followed by four satellite meetings on single-shot pulse energy and pulse length measurements, as well as wavefront characterisation and soft X-ray photon diagnostics. The satellite workshops were also held as online meetings. As the groups were smaller, a more direct interaction between the participants was possible.
As a ceremonial element during the conference schedule, the FoE Award on Photon Transport and Diagnostics 2020 was given to Dr. Ichiro Inoue and Dr. Taito Osaka from RIKEN Spring-8 Center in recognition of their outstanding contributions related to the fields of free electron laser photon diagnostics, photon transport, beamline developments, and instrumentation.
Besides constrains given by the Corona pandemic, PSI was contented being the host of the PhotonDiag2020 and would like to thank all participants for their contributions, the program committee, that included people from all across the world facilities, the session chairs and the local organisation team, for making the conference a great success.
The next PhotonDiag 2022 will be hosted by the ‘Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, HZB’.