NEutrons and PHotons Elevating Worldwide Science - NEPHEWS is a project that integrate together two European Users Organizations, ESUO and ENSA, with two largest and most advanced consortia LEAPS and LENS. The idea of this project is to develop a new way of cooperation, where neutron facilities works side by side with LEAPS Infrastructures. Additionally, NEPHEWS will give a voice to users through a pioneering User-to-User approach, providing ESUO and ENSA with a leading role in the development of the project.
As of January 1, 2024, a new project "NEPHEWS - Neutrons and Photons Elevating Worldwide Science" has emerged on the European map, led by NCPS SOLARIS. This initiative holds significant importance within the Horizon Europe Program, marked by Polish coordination, broad partnership and unique substantive scope.
The project primary objective is to grant researchers access to cutting-edge European photon source (LEAPS - League of European Accelerator-based Photon Sources) and neutron source (LENS- League of advanced European Neutron Sources). This access aims to enhance collaboration with User communities in supported countries and foster research excellence.
Close cooperation with ESUO (European Synchrotron and Free Electron Laser User Organization) and ENSA (European Neutron Scattering Association) representing over 40 thousand Users, underscore the project's commitment to meeting the specific needs of these communities throughout their scientific career development. Geographically, the NEPHEWS project prioritizes European developing countries (Widening countries), Ukraine, and Africa.
The project employs a bottom-up, User-centered approach to create an integrated landscape of photon and neutron research infrastructures and their European User communities. This approach is unprecedented in the scale of European collaborative networks.
The objectives of the NEPHEWS project are the following:
• Objective 1 Curiosity driven Trans-National Access provision: Our primary objective is to provide access for curiosity-driven science for users of the open SR, FEL and advanced N facilities via TNA funding, where such access is an activity with strong European added value that is not usually supported by national funding bodies. This will in total provide 38,290 hours of TNA funded access to the NEPHEWS consortium open RI for 902 researchers to pursue frontier knowledge science, spanning all curiosity-driven areas, and provided with the necessary financial and logistic access support;
• Objective 2. Lowering of barriers to access: To communicate and educate about access mechanisms, novel research opportunities, support structures and benefits of these world-class facilities to new users, ESRs, in wider user communities, nationally, regionally or in scientific fields/disciplines not normally using these RI;
• Objective 3: Twinning for scientific sustainability: To twin new users, new user groups, new ESRs, scientists new to these techniques or established non-expert users with hosting expert user groups to participate in twinning experiments at these RIs. In total 135 new users will be twinned with willing expert hosting user groups, will participate in experiments of the expert group, in-person on-site embedded with their hosts. This will foster collaboration, rapidly bring these new users up to speed in their knowledge, substantially decreasing their barrier to entry in independently accessing these RI, and in the preparation and submission of their own high-quality scientific proposals to RI; now a seed for future user groups and twinning hosts;
• Objective 4: Advocate for Sustainable National Access Mechanisms: To advocate for national policy initiatives that will increase access, or lower financial barriers to access, for users within multiple countries across Europe. A particular emphasis will be firstly in those targeted Widening countries or countries without facilities and their NFAs to at a minimum fund the costs of the extra-national access for their national users of LEAPS and LENS RI. NFAs in these targeted countries are engaged with throughout.
The NEPHEWS project aims to integrate groundbreaking research infrastructure landscape, fostering collaboration and excellence in photon and neutron research across Europe.
