July 8, 2021 marked the inauguration of the Material Science (MS) beamline. 

Switzerland’s Ambassador Lukas Gasser, along with members of his embassy team, and UNESCO Representative to Jordan Min Jeong Kim were welcomed by SESAME Director General Khaled Toukan and SESAME directors.

On this occasion, Toukan stated that the Material Science beamline allows the users of SESAME now to obtain from their samples diffraction data of quality unparalleled by any laboratory equipment available in the region, according to a SESAME statement. 

The Swiss contribution has provided most of its equipment, issuing a new, powerful and extremely precise tool to investigate the matter at the micro-, nano- and atomic scale in SESAME, the statement said.

SESAME’s MS beamline scientist Mahmoud Abdellatief gave a presentation on the many applications possible with the MS beamlines, and how experiments using SESAME may boost scientific research in the region.

"Switzerland is one of the observer countries of SESAME since 2010. It has been a firm proponent of the centre and has been very generous in the help it has provided, including the support via the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) which contributed actively with advice, training and assistance, from optimising the overall SESAME timing system of the injection process into the booster, to the design of components, to support the dismantling of the MS X04SA SLS beamline at the PSI which would soon have been donated to SESAME, where it has been finally reassembled as the MS beamline that we inaugurate today,” read the statement. 

This support continues also today, where PSI is participating financially together with INFN in Italy to the purchase of a critical component for the injector of SESAME.

The Material Science (MS) beamline project was initiated in 2015, with the adaptation and design of the MS X04SA SLS beamline to the characteristics of SESAME. In 2016, after receiving the donation of another major component, a detector from the Swiss company Dectris, the MS beamline execution project was fast-tracked. 

The installation phase took place between 2017 and 2019, through which SESAME received a diffractometer as a donation from Diamond Light Source. Upon sourcing the necessary equipment, the MS beam was first delivered to SESAME’s experimental station at the end of 2019.

Fine tuning and characterisation of its performance continued during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in December 2020, the Material Science beamline started hosting the first users. As of today, a first paper utilising data taken at the MS beamline has been already published in a high-impact journal.

A ribbon was cut by Gasser and Toukan.

The Swiss ambassador along with his embassy team, and UNESCO representative to Jordan were taken on a tour of the centre during which they were shown the beamline facilities by the Scientific Director, Andrea Lausi, and informed of the many scientific applications being carried out at SESAME.

 At the end of the tour, Gasser congratulated the director general of SESAME and his staff for what has been accomplished. 

He expressed great satisfaction with the important role Switzerland is playing in SESAME given that it will allow scientists from the region to carry out state-of-the-art research and help develop collaborative projects between scientists with diverse cultural and political backgrounds, the statement said.