eu-researcher-interview.md

Questions sent by Patrick from EU researcher journal for the interview on Feb 8,2022. Collecting here thoughts on answers.

1. Could we just start by getting an understanding of the project's overall aims and objectives?

• More importantly is to understand that the people who wrote the proposal are scientists from the facilities. So besides the objectives stated in the proposal (GA), the main objective was to really make life easier to our beamline scientists. We didn’t want to waste time on ‘theoretical objectives', which might nor might not be of use, but on the daily work of our scientists or customers. And to be noted, the people who met in London are managers from the operation branch of the facility who know what there are talking about.
• We only had to bring our objectives in line with the EOSC goals, which wasn’t that difficult as the have a large overlap.
• In this context we need to talk about leaps and lens.
• Official objectives are :
  • To deliver the EOSC to the wide variety of Photon and Neutron users
  • To enable FAIR scientific data at European national RIs
  • To make national RI data accessible to user communities via the EOSC
  • To enrich the set of data services available in the EOSC with services from national RIs
  • To raise the level of awareness and competence in FAIR data practices within user communities
  • To engage with the EOSC programme to empower national RI user communities and to maintain sustainability

FAIR, EOSC, national RIs missing from PaNOSC. Example.

1.b) Is Expands essentially about enabling wider access to information on photons and neutrons, would this help more scientists participate in research and share their expertise?

• The question is a bit misleading. We don’t work on information on photons and neutrons. That are the scientists in High Energy Physics.
• CLARIFY : What is photon and neutron science
  • beam, detector, technology, analysis.
  • Why photon and neutron. (common : wave, electric , strong force)
• Enabling access is not the only objective. But yes it would help in a variety of ways.
• Science is generally always based on the findings of previous experiments (or evaluations , findings).
• So the more information you can collect before you start working on a particular topic the more precise will be your work and the less you have to repeat.
• Therefor is essential that you can find and understand the work which was done in the past.
• This is somehow evident in the particular field, but the hope of the commission is to allow other areas to benefit from the science done at the photon and N. facilities.
• Looking more in details: Even the parameter space you start you work with can be significantly reduced which lowers costs and efforts. Which is particularly important of you instrument is expensive.
  • Sophie recently reported on a use case with reflectometry were the initial condition of the experiement could be reduced due to previous investigations.

2. Is the data generated by synchrotron experiments relevant to quite a wide variety of fields? Who do you expect will be interested in the data from these experiments,

• The field are essentially endless.
• Wherever you need deep inside into matter you need bright (high energetic) short and brilliant laser pulses. (or high density focused neutron beams.)
• Besides the different technologies (how you use the beam to make the picture) there is on the high level :
  • Medicine, Behaviour of protein structures in new medication, e.g BioNTech vaccines.
  • Biology, DNA and viruses.
  • Material, make them stronger and lighter, reduce aging.
  • Behaviour of especially water, which is becoming significant in the future.
  • New Technologies, like quantum and batterie science
  • Culturual Heritage, non invasive investiations of very old material , picture and documents.

2.b: is it relevant to both applied research and fundamental science?

• Applied science alrady covered before.
• But all kind of fundamental research:
  • only one example: Zeptosecond birth time delay in molecular photoionization Sven Grundmann, 2020/10/16 10.1126/science.abb9318
  • In general: As we reach the Angstrom area, we step into quantum effects which are very interresting to observe.

3. Is quite sophisticated equipment typically required to conduct research into photon and neutron behaviour, are some researchers limited in their access to this equipment?

• It is not the behavior of photon and neutrons but the behavior of the probes.
• The research material definitely need access to the equipment, the individual researcher might not. There were initiatives, already before Corana but particularly because of Corona to operate beamlines (this is where the scientists make their experiments) remotely. The probes are sent to the facility and the operators at the facilities apply the probes into the beam. There is quite some investment into robotics to do that. However the supply chain has to be made reliable (and timely)
• DIGITAL Leaps.

3.b. Do you aim to help widen access to data?

• So yes, in consequence of you precious question, data needs to be accessable from outside of the facility. But we have to distinquish between making it available to the involved scientitists (that was possible already in the past) and making it available to other scientists which could be with similar objectives are fields of research or to completely different scientitists.
• EOSC is a chance to widen access to data, but it is not a quarantee.
• Known problem of some labs that can't afford proprietary software for data analsyis in specific fields. otherwise it's open calls so wveryone should be able to access our instruments and 'only' need to bring their probe along.

4. Do existing research infrastructures like the diamond light source and the ALBA synchrotron have similar facilities, do they complement each other?

• Each facility has its specialties, in wavelenght, in luminosity, even neutron and photon complement each other (photo of the telephone). And inside the facility, again each beamline has its own community / application / possibilities. Commonalities too of course. Prepare some examples.
• Both: the complement and there is competition in term of the technologies. But the basic phycis is the same.
• e.g. ALBA: EIGHT OPERATING BEAMLINES HOST USER EXPERIMENTS.
  • INFRARED MICROSPECTROSCOPY
  • MATERIALS SCIENCE AND POWDER DIFFRACTION BEAMLINE
  • SOFT X-RAY MICROSCOPY
  • NON-CRYSTALLINE DIFFRACTION
  • MACROMOLECULAR CRYSTALLOGRAPHY
  • CORE LEVEL ABSORPTION & EMISSION SPECTROSCOPIES
  • PHOTOEMISSION SPECTROSCOPY AND MICROSCOPY
  • RESONANT ABSORPTION AND SCATTERING
  • ANGLE RESOLVED PHOTOEMISSION SPECTROSCOPY (ARPES)
  • OPTICS CHARACTERIZATION
• Diamond
  • Mol Cristal. MX
  • Fixed Wavelength MX
  • Long Wavelength MX
  • Mircofocus MX
  • Nono Science
  • Surface and Interface Diffraction
  • Soft X-Ray
  • Ptychographre
  • High Resolution Powder Diffraction
  • XFEL Hub

4.b. Do you have both high energy physics machines and sources of synchrotron light in the project?

• well that is difficult to distinguish. The electron part of the sychrotron is physically a high energry physics machine as it is accelerating electrons to Gev energy. The modern sync. are build exactly for those purposes but e.g. at DESY the Petra ring was a HEP machine in the past.

5. Is the project aiming to develop a more standardised approach to data collection and data management at photon and neutron facilities? Do different facilities currently have different policies, do they generate different types of data?

• oh yes. differences in embargo periods, in curation policy, in the use of DOIs, even in who is owning the data.
• Whole point of trying to standardise policies is that we have users using several of our facilities (because of the above mentioned complementarity of instruments) and we want to make their life easier.
• About the types of data generated, mention efforts towards NeXus.

6. Are you providing access to both data from experiments, and also the subsequent analysis of that data by different groups of researchers?

• often a first data analysis workflow is available at the beamline, on a specific technique, for example to reconstruct in 3D the structure of a molecule from the different images that were taken at the beamline (serial crystallography) so it's really useful to make these pipelines available to domain-scientists so that at least their first step of the analysis is done.
• then more generally we want to enable the scientists to make their workflow available along with the data, so giving them the infrastructures and the framework to do so. Jupyter notebooks help a lot for that and also cloud computing, in particular container technologies.

6b. How can you ensure that data is provided in a way that meets the FAIR principles?

• what is important to keep in mind, is that we try to make the data produced by our facilities as FAIR as possible by default.
• starts with automating the collection of the metadata and using standard formats and vocabularies as much as possible (NeXus, techniques ontology)
• then provide an infrastructure for persistent identifiers: already mainstream for publications, more and more spread for data and people and we're working also on instruments and samples, particularyly relevant for remote access.
• self-FAIR assessment and pushing for data stewards - policies and standards are a moving target, RDA and NIAC involvement
• in the end, it lies in the hands of the researchers but we can already make a lot happen without them even noticing.

7. Is the project aiming to provide shared access to data from current day experiments, as well as experiments that have already been conducted?

• From current day and future experiments for sure, for past ones: will be left to the researcher. more and more possibilities offered by journals to link data to an already published publication (Elsevier e.g.) so could be an incentive.
• More on the past ones : with much better detectors previous images might become less interesting. Especially in PaN, experiments can be repeated. Other than in astronomy and earth science. You can neither watch the explosion of a super nova nor the extinction of a species a second time, but you can put better probes into more brilliant beams and higher resolution detectors. (So it is repeatable science like High Energy Physics)
• For us it depends on the policy, we can only make open what was produced when the data policy saying it will be made available after the embargo period was in application.

7b Do the research infrastructures have extensive archives of data, will this be provided on an open access basis?

• in general facilities archive all the data produced, but if it's not FAIR it's not reusable so it's mostly useless. the rate at which archived datasets are accessed is very low today. this is what we are changing, making this gold mine usable.
• important now is to have access to extensive archives of FAIR data. and yes all this data will be made open access once embargo period are over - typically 3 years after the experiment. it's already started with open data catalogues of facilities openly accessible from a webbrowser (and in EOSC).

8. Do you expect that shared access to data will help academics work more efficiently and avoid duplicating research? Will scientists be able to re-use data available via EOSC to conduct entirely new research?

• oh yes that's the whole point. More efficiently because they will have access to more previously performed research (ex. given above of the reflectometry community which can set model parameters in a much more accurate way when they have access to previous data).
• This accompanies a change of paradigm too, making the data available and then waiting for unknown scientists to make the best use of it possible. This was started by Copernicus around 2014 already, they made the data openly available and since then we've seen a lot of emerging papers. It's the same with the ESRF human atlas that was recently launched - the publication is only the (open) data, there is not paper.

9. Is photon and neutron data central to the technologies of the future, for example quantum computers?

• In general Yes: for new technologies one need to understand the material it is build upon. So like batteries, nano technologies, aging process in material but also ‘cultural heritage’ allowing to read book and other documents w/o opening (breaking) them.
• Aircraft as an example: - no we don't build aircrafts. But we do study material properties, crack propagation, the effect of additive manufacturing on material structure. And those results are often directly relevant to the making of aircraft parts and improving efficiency/weight/enabling new designs etc.
• Take the JWT. It is infrared astronomy. Webb's mirrors are covered in a microscopically thin layer of gold, and it is Beryllium, 5 times larger than hubble and lighter.
• On quantum is the same: There was a task force discussing this at one point Short answer: We study materials, material properties, including measurements of quantum effects. These materials and an understanding of them is needed to make quantum computers. But do we make the computers themselves, or have direct input into the machines - no. We are in effect a layer or two back providing measurements and data to those who do that.
• BUT : LEAPS meets Quantum Technology in May on Elba

9b. How important is photon and neutron data to the development of new medicines and new technologies?

• I think that has already beeing answered above.

10. Do you have any plans to extend the project beyond its initial term, how do you anticipate your research will evolve in future? Could the Expands project turn into a permanent initiative, will further facilities be added in future?

• Not in this particular configuation.
• As we don't have the ESFRIs in our project, a permanent initiative needs to be broader. Which is were LEAPs and LENs come in.
• They are the backbone for further common development, policies and the launch of more EU project with data policies and improved technologies in mind.
• But ExPaNDS got them the oportunity and the money to consolidate some topics and to adjust their long term objectives.