Speaker
Prof.
Miguel A. G. Aranda
(ALBA-CELLS Synchrotron Light Source)
Description
ALBA synchrotron light source (www.cells.es) and IPM signed an agreement in September-2016 for boosting synchrotron usage by Iranian scientists. This agreement included the booking of 20 beamline days for the Iranian users to be allocated after the launching of a call for proposals and the appropriate evaluation based on scientific excellence (by an Iranian committee) and on technical and safety feasibility (by ALBA staff). As part of this effort, an IPM-ALBA workshop devoted to report and deeply discuss the available ALBA beamlines and techniques to the future Iranian users took place in Tehran in November-2016. This workshop was not general but tailored to the usage of the available ALBA techniques. Later, the call for proposals was launched with a deadline of March-10th 2017. The selected experiments, as today the evaluations are in progress, will be carried out at ALBA in the period September to December-2017.
A core task within any user-oriented facility in the writing (by the users) and the evaluation (by expert committee(s)) of the proposals submitted for requesting to carry out an specific research. This talk, after introducing the IPM(ILSF)-ALBA agreement will be devoted to show how to write a good synchrotron beamtime proposal.
Several guidelines (and tips) about the structure and content of a proposal will be given. A good proposal must be complete but not very large, and focused to address a clear scientific challenge. In addition to clearly establish the goal and scope of the proposal, several sections must be addressed in order to allow a thorough evaluation with a successful output: I) a brief and sound introduction to frame the research; ii) any relevant previous laboratory-based characterisation and results obtained by the research group; iii) the scientific methodology and synchrotron radiation technique to be employed; iv) the results to be expected; v) the justification of the requested beamtime; vi) the relevant bibliography. In case of non-expert users, it is strongly encouraged to contact the relevant beamline scientist in order to ask for the technical feasibility of the proposed work and to look for advised of an optimum match between the expected scientific outputs and the beamlines performances and capabilities.
