SRI 2021 online conference 28 March - 1 April 2022

The SRI2021 Conference took place in the time between March 28 and April 1, 2022. It was organised jointly by DESY and European XFEL and had originally been scheduled for the last summer. However, it was postponed due to the pandemic until spring 2022. With the pandemic still not over, the organisers and the international conference committee have taken the difficult decision not to postpone the conference again, but to hold it online instead. And it was a success! More than 1160 international participants met virtually.

The success story began at DESY 40 years ago with the first SRI conference, organised in Hamburg. Those days, DORIS was the only synchrotron radiation source in Hamburg. Today, there are three unique and outstanding research facilities that attract users to the Hamburg metropolitan region: World's most powerful X-ray free-electron laser European XFEL, PETRA III, one of the brightest storage ring-based X-ray radiation sources in the world, and the world's first free-electron laser in the soft X-ray range, FLASH. SRI provides a common forum for scientists and users of more than 50 operating or planned synchrotron radiation light sources and free-electron lasers from all over the world, and also aims to bridge the gap to other disciplines and innovation.

The research areas that are now in focus at the SRI conference have become manyfold. The ultra-short and precise flashes of light offer a wide range of exciting opportunities for investigation, from materials research to medical applications. At the same time, they pose great challenges for instrumentation and analytical methods. One of the main focuses of the contributions to SRI2021 deals with the associated technical challenges and new experimental methods.

The next SRI conference will take place in Hamburg in 2024, this time in person.