In 2024, the first stations of the collective use center Siberian Ring Photon Source (SRPS) will be launched in Russia. SRPS will be the most advanced synchrotron in the world, and Tomsk State University will provide detectors for two research stations. In addition, TSU is training personnel for SRPS and organizing a school on synchrotron radiation for young scientists.
“In recent decades, high-intensity synchrotron radiation has become the most crucial and universal tool for studying the properties of matter, stars, the internal structure of the Earth, biomedical research of molecules and viruses, and substances with new properties,” said Anton Tyazhev, one of the organizers of the school, a researcher at the Laboratory of Synchrotron Radiation Detectors at TSU. “The use of systems with energy-dispersive semiconductor detectors enables us to solve these issues.”
Currently, there are 70 synchrotron radiation sources in the world. Scientists worldwide perform more than 20 thousand experiments on them annually. Russian SRPS will enable raising fundamental and applied research to the level of a Nobel prize.
At the Synchrotron Radiation School, organized in the framework of the Current Trends of Radiophysics-2023 conference, experts presented a series of lectures on the main problems of developing radiation-hard semiconductor multi-element detectors to support research infrastructure of synchrotron sources for SRPS 4+ and other megascience projects in the Russian Federation. In particular, Ian Zubavichus, deputy director of the SRPS for academic affairs, gave a talk on the realization of the SRPS project and the prospects for the Russian user community. The topic of the lecture by Lev Shekhtman, Chief Researcher of TSU and Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, was detectors for studying fast processes at SRPS.
Advanced Technologies in Microelectronics Research Center of TSU is carrying out the development of such sensors, supported by a grant from the Russian government. Currently, the sensors that will be the heart of the detectors for SRPS are being tested at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics.
Tomsk State University is a world leader in detector development. A research group led by Oleg Tolbanov, professor of the Faculty of Radiophysics at TSU, has created sensors that have already been installed at synchrotrons in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.