Making a valuable resource usable with water
In oil extraction sites, gaseous methane is simply burned, even though it could actually be a useful precursor material for fuels and products of the chemical industry. One way to make methane usable is to convert it to methanol. Being liquid, methanol is easier to transport than methane, and it can be used both as fuel and as raw material for the chemical industry.
Inauguration and first beam of PSI’s X-ray FEL SwissFEL
On December 5th, in the presence of the President of Switzerland Johann Schneider-Ammann, PSI inaugurated the X-ray Free Electron Laser facility, SwissFEL, after 4 years of construction. The facility consists of a low emittance injector, a 6 GeV linear electron accelerator, a string of 12 undulator magnets designed for FEL lasing at photon energies of up to 12.8 keV and photon beamlines and end-stations. The SwissFEL building is located in a forest site near the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). Its total building length is 740m. In its initial configuration, SwissFEL is equipped with two end stations for user experiments dedicated to studies in photochemistry/photobiology, structural biology and condensed matter physics.
Nanometres in 3D
Scientists at the Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zurich (Switzerland) have created 3D images of tiny objects showing details down to 25 nanometres (1 nanometre = 1 millionth of a millimetre). In addition to the shape, the scientists determined how particular chemical elements were distributed in their sample and whether these elements were in a chemical compound or in their pure state.
