Apply for privileged beam time

Sweden's privileged access allowance

Sweden’s total privileged access allowance is equivalent to the use of 1.5 beamlines per year, which amounts to 5 300 hours of beam time at PETRA III. These hours can be allocated between all DESY-operated beamlines at PETRA III. The upper limit of Swedish privileged access is 70% of the total user time at the Swedish beamline's P21.2 beam line branch, 35% of the time at the Swedish beamline's P21.1 branch, and 20% of the total user time the other DESY-operated beamlines.

Application portal and eligibility

To gain privileged access to PETRA III, it is necessary to submit a beam time proposal via DESY's Door system. Calls typically have deadlines of 1 March and 1 September of each year.

To be eligible for privileged access, the leader of the beam time project proposal must be affiliated to a Swedish university, research organisation or company.

Apply for privileged access in the DOOR system

Apply for privileged access at DOOR by submitting a beam time proposal if you will publish measurement results.

door.desy.de/door/

Procedure for applying for and awarding proposals

The call and review of beamtime project proposals is managed by DESY and the stages in their procedure are as follows.

1. Researchers who are interested in making a proposal must register in the Door system.
2. The Door system then informs registered users when calls are open, provides call information, deadlines and measurement access periods as well as describes the format and criteria for project proposals.
3. Researchers prepare their consortium and project proposal, including their requested beamline and measurement setup, and submit the proposal in the Door system. NOTE. It is important to tick the box "Swedish proposal eligible for privileged access" and the Project Leader must be affiliated to a Swedish organisation.
4. Every proposal, both Swedish and non-Swedish, is then individually evaluated by DESY's Proposal Review Panels. Evaluations of each proposal are made, based on scientific excellence and project feasibility. Project feasibility includes an assessment of the consortium’s competencies in using synchrotron X-ray facilities.
5. Using the evaluation results, by beamline, project proposals are ranked for beam time access, with the cut-off based on the available hours for regular access at the particular beamtime.  

Privileged access award round

Swedish proposals which don't gain access then have a second chance.

The process for prioritising Swedish proposals is then:

1. Per beamline, the ranking of each Swedish proposal is normalised by the number of proposals submitted at that deadline to that beamline.
2. For all beamlines, Swedish proposals are then ranked against each other.
3. Starting with the highest ranking proposals, beamtime is allocated if there is available priviledged access time at that beamline.
4. Swedish proposals are granted beamtimes until all of Sweden's priviledged access allowance is used.

Monitoring

CeXS protects Swedish interests by i) collecting data about Swedish submissions ii) verifying eligibility for Swedish privileged access as well as iii) observing the allocation of Swedish privileged access. Subsequently, we iii) collect data about actual a) Swedish use of all PETRA III beamlines and b) all use of the P21 beamline branches at PETRA III.