European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) – France

About us

The ESRF is the most intense and brilliant hard X-ray sources existing today worldwide. An extremely bright source that produces X-rays 10 trillion times brighter than the X-rays used in hospitals or laboratories. Using these X-rays, the ESRF functions like a “super-microscope”, which “films” the position and motion of atoms in condensed and living matter, and reveals the structure of matter in all its complexity allowing:

  • NON-DESTRUCTIVE probing of material structure;
  • HIGH SPATIAL RESOLUTION from millimetres to nanometres and even to atomic resolution;
  • FAST-TO-FOLLOW processes in real time with less than a microsecond time resolution;
  • IN SITU ANALYSIS under real manufacturing and operating conditions (extreme temperatures, pressure, mechanical stress, chemical environments, etc.);
  • WIDE RANGE OF SAMPLE ENVIRONMENTS: furnaces, cryostats, diamond anvil cells, large volume press, on-line mixing, microfluidics, gas atmospheres…

The ESRF offers industry privileged and practical access to its 44 highly specialised experimental stations, called “beamlines”, in a completely confidential manner (through the Non-Disclosure Agreement). Each beamline is equipped with state-of-the-art instrumentation, which support a wide range of experimental techniques. More about our techniques.