LEAPS Technology Roadmap implementation for enhancing competitiveness and innovation of Europe´s accelerator-based photon sources

LEAPS-TECH is a collaborative initiative designed to accelerate the implementation of the LEAPS Technology Roadmap 2025, strengthening Europe’s leadership in accelerator-based photon science and contributing to solving key challenges for over 50 facilities in Europe and worldwide. Building on the unique pan-European network LEAPS, the League of European Accelerator-Based Photon Sources founded in 2017, which unites 19 European synchrotron and free-electron laser (FEL) user facilities, the project enhances the scientific and technological sovereignty of Europe’s photon sources, with their tens of thousands of users, including high-impact industrial applications. LEAPS-TECH will deliver two core objectives: (1) strategic co-development of advanced technologies with highly specialised European industry and academia to ensure global competitiveness and (2) accelerating standardisation and interoperability across LEAPS facilities to increase research infrastructure (RI) capacity and efficiency and reduce technological fragmentation. Seven technology work packages (WPs) spanning the entire LEAPS roadmap, from undulators, diagnostics, optics and detectors to sample environments for academia and industry including data management, form the heart of LEAPS-TECH, based on their potential for co-innovation, their ability to enhance European leadership and their urgency for advancing user science and services. By targeting high-impact innovations in accelerator, beamline and instrumentation technologies, LEAPS-TECH will support transformative upgrades to the European photon sources and expand their capabilities for academic and industrial discovery. It will strengthen Europe’s industrial base as suppliers of novel technologies for the RI and new markets. In an overarching WP, an innovation engine will strategically coordinate training, mobility and innovation uptake, including the next generation of synchrotron and FEL scientists and engineers via a cascading funding model.