LEAPS Technology Roadmap implementation for enhancing competitiveness and innovation of Europe's accelerator-based photon sources
LEAPS-TECH is a collaborative initiative to accelerate the implementation of the LEAPS Technology Roadmap 2025. It is designed to strengthen Europe’s leadership in accelerator-based photon science and contribute to solving key technology challenges for over 50 facilities in Europe and worldwide. The project builds on the pan-European network LEAPS, the League of European Accelerator-Based Photon Sources founded in 2017, which unites 19 synchrotron (SR) and free-electron laser (FEL) research infrastructures (RIs). It enhances the technological and scientific sovereignty of Europe’s photon sources with their tens of thousands of users, including high-impact industries. LEAPS-TECH will deliver two core objectives: (1) strategic co-development of advanced technologies with highly specialised European industry and academia communities to ensure global competitiveness and (2) accelerating standardisation and interoperability across LEAPS facilities to increase RI capacity, sustainability and efficiency, and reduce technological fragmentation.
Seven technology work packages (WPs), spanning the entire LEAPS roadmap, form the heart of LEAPS-TECH, based on their potential for co-innovation, their ability to enhance European leadership and their urgency for advancing user science and services. Topics include undulators, diagnostics, optics, detectors, sample environments and data management. LEAPS-TECH will support the planned and on-going upgrades of photon sources in Europe, and expand their capabilities for academic and industrial discovery by targeting high-impact innovations in photon source, beamline and experimental instrumentation technologies. It will strengthen Europe’s industrial base of suppliers of novel technologies for RIs and other new markets. An innovation engine, established as an overarching WP, will strategically coordinate training and innovation uptake, including the next generation of SR and FEL researchers and engineers via a cascading funding model.
