Paul Scherrer Institute
It is located in the Canton of Aargau in the municipalities Villigen and Würenlingen on either side of the River Aare, and covers an area over 35 hectares in size.
[4] PSI develops, builds and operates large and complex research facilities and makes them available to the national and international scientific communities.
Since Switzerland decided in 2011 to phase out nuclear energy,[9] this research has primarily been concerned with questions of safety, such as how to store radioactive waste safely in a deep geological repository.
[10] Since 1984, PSI has operated (initially as SIN) the centre for Proton Therapy for treating patients with eye melanomas and other tumours located deep inside the body.
In 1992, physicists used accelerator mass spectrometry and radiocarbon methods to determine the age of Ötzi, the mummy found in a glacier in the Ötztal Alps a year earlier, from small samples of just a few milligrams of bone, tissue and grass.
In 2009, the Indian-born British structural biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for, among other things, his research at the Synchrotron Light Source Switzerland (SLS).
In 2010, an international team of researchers at PSI used negative muons to perform a new measurement of the proton and found that its radius is significantly smaller than previously thought: 0.84184 femtometers instead of 0.8768.
[13] The measurements were only possible with PSI's 590 MeV proton accelerator HIPA because its secondarily generated muon beam is the only one worldwide that is intense enough to conduct the experiment.
According to a newspaper report,[17] the federal government had a secret plutonium storage facility in which the material had been kept since the 1960s to construct an atomic bomb as planned at the time.
[23] The largest spin-off, with 120 employees, is the DECTRIS AG, founded in 2006 in nearby Baden, which specializes in the development and marketing of X-ray detectors.
This makes PSI currently (2020) the only institute in the world to provide the four most important probes for researching the structure and dynamics of condensed matter (neutrons, muons and synchrotron radiation) on a campus for the international user community.
Fundamental research in this area contributes to the development of new materials with a wide range of applications, for example in electrical engineering, medicine, telecommunications, mobility, new energy storage systems, quantum computers and spintronics.
[26] They therefore serve as ideal probes for investigating fundamental and applied research topics, such as quantum spin systems and their potential for application in future computer technologies, the functionalities of complex lipid membranes and their use for the transport and targeted release of drug substances, as well as the structure of novel materials for energy storage as key components in intelligent energy networks.
Particle physics at PSI holds many records, including the most precise determination of the coupling constants of the weak interaction and the most accurate measurement of the charge radius of the proton.
[28] Some experiments aim to find effects that are not foreseen in the Standard Model, but which could correct inconsistencies in the theory or solve unexplained phenomena from astrophysics and cosmology.
Examples include the upper limit measured in the MEG experiment of the hypothetical decay of positive muons into positrons and photons[29] as well as that of the permanent electric dipole moment for neutrons.
[32] At PSI a method for extracting significantly more methane gas from biowaste was developed and successfully tested with the help of the ESI platform together with the Zurich power company Energie 360°.
Catalysis is a central component in various energy conversion processes, for example in fuel cells, water electrolysis and the methanation of carbon dioxide.
To test the pollutant emissions of various energy production processes and the behaviour of the corresponding substances in the atmosphere, PSI also operates a smog chamber.
[33] Another area of research at PSI is on the effects of energy production on the atmosphere locally, including in the Alps, in the polar regions of the Earth[34] and in China.
When combined for therapy with special biomolecules (antibodies), therapeutic molecules can be formed to selectively and specifically detect tumour cells.
[41] Since the opening of the Synchrotron Light Source Switzerland (SLS), structural biology has been a further focus of research in the field of human health.
[43][44] With the help of PSI's SwissFEL free-electron X-ray laser, which was inaugurated in 2016, researchers have been able to analyse dynamic processes in biomolecules with extremely high time resolution – less than a trillionth of a second (picosecond).
[50] Only three such rings exist worldwide, namely: TRIUMF in Vancouver, Canada; LAMPF in Los Alamos, USA; and the one at PSI.
[53] Six measuring stations (FLAME (from 2021), DOLLY, GPD, GPS, HAL-9500, and LEM) with instruments for a wide range of applications are available for such investigations.
In order to cool down the neutrons, however, it uses frozen deuterium at a temperature of 5 Kelvin (corresponding to −268 degrees Celsius) as a cold moderator.
This superconducting 250 MeV cyclotron has been in operation for proton therapy since 2007 and provides the beam for treating tumours in cancer patients.
[64] The centre offers a wide range of basic and advanced training courses for both professionals and others working with ionising radiation or radioactive materials.
PSI holds about 100 active patent families[65] in, for example, medicine, with investigation techniques for proton therapy against cancer or for the detection of prions, the cause of mad cow disease.
[66][67] Patents have, for example, been granted for detectors used in high-performance X-ray cameras developed for the Swiss Synchrotron Light Source SLS, which can be used to investigate materials at the atomic level.
