DESY – official website www.desy.de - is one of the world leading accelerator centres for the investigation of the structure of matter. It furthermore offers ideal prerequisites to be a nucleation centre for developing new emerging ideas on nanoscience - all this in one single multidisciplinary environment.

The DESY campus does in fact host the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL), while the Centre for Structural Systems Biology (CSSB), currently under construction, shall unite a great number of activities in the field of life sciences, ranging from protein crystallography to infection research.

Moreover, the construction of the Centre for Hybrid Nanostructures (CHYN), recently started at the DESY campus, shall in the near future house several research groups from the Department of Physics of the University of Hamburg.

In this project, DESY will participate with its NanoLab Institute as a facility for users and for in-house research. It is being developed and operated by the DESY Research Group X-ray Physics and Nanoscience.

One of DESY’s principal areas of activities is the development and operation of accelerators for synchrotron radiation sources and free-electron lasers, in order to observe structures and processes on extremely small space and time scales.