If you build it, they will come: Can big science make a science city?

Local politicians and researchers in Lund are calling it Science Village Scandinavia, but the ambitions belie the village tag, with hopes that the city’s two new and expensive science facilities will attract global interest from science and industry.

MAX IV, one of the most advanced synchrotron X-ray light facilities in the world, will open its doors in the Village next year. Just down the road a €1.8 billion neighbour, the European Spallation Source (ESS) is now under construction and will begin operations in 2020.

Close by is Lund University. Its vice-chancellor, Torbjörn Von Schantz, was at a meeting of more than 100 scientists and politicians in Brussels this week to talk up the prospects of creating a cluster around the new facilities, which Von Schantz says will be a honeypot for talent from around the world.

“It’ll be the only place in the world where you’ll have a synchrotron and neutron source within cycling distance of a university,” he said.  

But if Lund is really serious about spawning a new science ecosystem, it is not enough simply for governments to invest in labs, said Christian Vettier, who advises another of Europe’s major light sources, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble. There needs to be political will - for which read money - to create mini-metropolises around them.

New clusters do not develop organically, nor can they be delivered to order. “When scientists move their families out to a new research hub, it’s not always easy for them [all] to find jobs. It’s not the facility’s problem, it’s up to the urban planners and municipal authorities to look after this,” said Vettier, who is also an adviser to the ESS board.

It is virtually an article of faith among large research institutes that for clusters to take off industry participation is vital. The belief rests on the premise that ‘big ticket’ scientific infrastructures should pay their way after government funding helps them off the ground. 

Helmut Dosch, director of the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, Desy, said that 10 years ago his institution was seen as a “knowledge island” which was, “well appreciated by some but de-coupled from society.”

Desy was founded in Hamburg after the Second World War to help German science recover from a massive brain drain. But while it was used by scientists, its only contact with industry was in the initial construction period.

After coming under political pressure, the institute jolted awake 10 years ago. Since then it has spared little effort in building ties with surrounding research institutes and businesses. “The result is that today we receive 3,000 guest scientists a year,” said Dosch. The demand for beam time is three times greater than the institute’s capacity. 

The story of Desy is not unique. Giant science facilities are regularly called on to justify their cost, not only in terms of their contribution to science, but also to their neighbourhood.

Unquestionably, ESRF has been a boon for the local economy in Grenoble, said Vettier. “For every €10 received from the French public purse, the project has generated €27,” he said.

Attracting new talent

The forensic power of the spallation source will undoubtedly be a draw for scientists from a range of disciplines. ESS will produce a very bright neutron beam light source for studying the fine structure of materials. The neutrons bounce off atoms inside a material, in a process called spallation, painting a picture of the internal structure.

Although there are several existing light sources in Europe, the ESS will provide much improved performance, enabling detailed study down to the scale of five-billionths of a metre.

“It’s basically taking a picture of something on a tiny, tiny scale,” said ESS director-general Jim Yeck. “It’s like putting something under the Hubble Telescope.”

The value of probing molecular structures in this way was demonstrated by an experiment in 2014 at ESRF, a forbear to ESS, in which scientists deciphered the text in books destroyed during the Mount Vesuvius volcano eruption in AD 79. The facility’s X-Ray light beams were able to illuminate 1,840 charred fragments.

The US currently has the brightest source of neutrons in the world at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. “Its performance level is one megawatt power. ESS will be five times that,” said Yeck. 

The ESS mission

Yeck, who joined the ESS in 2013, has spent all his career in big science projects, helping to get the construction of the US National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory off the ground and running the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole for a period. He was also project director for the US hadron collider construction project at Fermilab and served as project manager for the construction of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, again at Brookhaven.

ESS is not burdened with being required to uncover any one ‘Eureka’ moment. “Unlike CERN, it doesn’t have a mission to make any particular discovery. We’re not after the next Higgs Boson. It’s going to be open-ended,” Yeck said.

The construction of the facility in Lund began last summer on a 100,000 square metre green field plot, a year behind schedule. The data management and software centre will be located in Copenhagen.

The €1.8 billion bill will be split among 17 partners, with almost half being footed by Sweden and Denmark. The UK will cover 10 per cent and Spain 5 per cent. The EU is chipping in €20 million from its Horizon 2020 research programme.

As a ‘European Research Infrastructure Consortium’, the ESS is owned by all the member countries and enjoys privileged conditions, including exemptions from VAT and excise duty.

Before the first experiments begin in 2023, there is a lot of high-precision equipment to pack together: a 600-metre linear proton accelerator, expected to be the most powerful ever built; a four-tonne, helium-cooled tungsten target wheel; 22 state-of-the-art neutron instruments, a suite of laboratories, and a supercomputing data management and software development centre.

If the construction is complex, the politics is doubly so. The European Commission Director-General for Research and Innovation Robert-Jan Smits said the great stumbling block for projects like this in Europe is the length of time taken to get agreement between member governments.  

In the case of ESS there was 25 years of lobbying and planning. And it may be many more years before Science Village Scandinavia matures and acquires the status of clusters like San Francisco, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cambridge, UK.

However, Von Schantz is now looking forward to getting the ball rolling by attracting new talent to Lund. “We see a lot of potential, [in] everything from a new PhD programme, to new adjunct professor positions and speaking opportunities for visiting researchers,” he said.