1974 DORIS: Electron marathon

DESY's second facility was at that time an even newer kind of accelerator: a storage ring. The "DOppelRIngSpeicher" ("Double Ring Storage"), or DORIS for short, was the first facility of its kind in Germany and had a circumference of 289 metres. Conceptualised for research in particle physics, DORIS helped investigate the newly discovered quarks. Today, we know that quarks comprise the atomic nucleus and count among the fundamental building blocks of matter.

Synchrotron radiation was initially just a byproduct of the operation of the DORIS accelerator. But the properties of the X-rays generated by the facility were from the beginning attractive for researchers and ushered in a new series of developments.

Schematic of the double-ring accelerator DORIS III with beamlines to experiment hutches. Picture: DESY

The interest in intense and bundled X-rays grew quickly. For this reason, in 1981, the Hamburg Synchrotron Laboratory, or HASYLAB, was inaugurated, which itself quickly became a world-renowned establishment.

Some years, over 2000 experts from across the world came to Hamburg in order to perform experiments at DORIS – physicists, chemists, and materials scientists, but also biologists, earth scientists, and engineers from industry. Hundreds of degrees and doctorates have their scientific roots in work at DORIS.

Countless scientific cooperations were formed – multinational, sometimes also interdisciplinary teams, all finding their way to experiments in Hamburg.

DORIS left a massive impression, and a precedent: when a large-scale scientific facility is built to meet the needs of science, it needs to be sustainably used for many decades thereafter.

Those who built DORIS had no idea of the enormous diversity of world-class results that its accelerator would deliver over time.