One billion euros for the technological transformation of the Alba Synchrotron
The Government of Catalonia and the Spanish Ministry for Science, Innovation, and Universities have signed an agreement establishing a joint contribution of nearly one billion euros until 2038 to transform the Alba Synchrotron into a fourth-generation synchrotron light infrastructure. The agreement was presented at an institutional event attended by UAB Rector Javier Lafuente.
Diana Mirant, minister for Science, Innovation, and Universities, and Salvador Illa, president of the Government of Catalonia, recently signed an agreement establishing a joint contribution of over €926 million over the 2025–2038 period to transform the Alba Synchrotron into a fourth-generation synchrotron light infrastructure. The total contributions made by the Catalan government will amount to almost €465 million over the agreed period. The Ministry Spanish for Science, Innovation, and Universities has committed to spending €461 million.
The agreement was presented at the Catalan synchrotron on 9 September, attended by numerous authorities and representatives of institutions and research centres, including Javier Lafuente, rector of the UAB and member of the synchrotron's governing council. Also participating in the event were Núria Montserrat, minister for Research and Universities, and Juan Cruz, secretary of state for Science, Innovation, and Universities.
Institutional representatives attending the presentation of the agreement at the ALBA Synchrotron.
The Alba II project will give way to a technological transformation that is essential to ensure that the synchrotron remains at the forefront of European and global research until 2050. The planned investment will enable the accelerator to be upgraded and new beamlines to be built, which will allow for more accurate and rapid studies and broaden the range of scientific and industrial applications. Catalonia will thus have a fourth-generation infrastructure, comparable to the most advanced in the world, which will respond to global challenges in health, energy transition, and sustainability.
The signing of this agreement consolidates the Alba Synchrotron as an essential infrastructure for scientific and industrial development, serving thousands of researchers every year and connected to leading research centres and companies around the world.
Key scientific infrastructure
Located in Cerdanyola del Vallès, the Alba Synchrotron is the only infrastructure of its kind in Spain and one of the most advanced in Europe. Conceived in the late 1990s and inaugurated in 2010, its core is a complex of electron accelerators that reach an energy of 3 GeV and emit synchrotron light ranging from soft X-rays to hard X-rays of 70 keV. This light makes it a large X-ray microscope, capable of analysing matter at the atomic and molecular scale.
It currently has fourteen beamlines that allow the structure and properties of matter to be visualised. Its advanced technologies, detectors, and data infrastructures are used each year by more than 3,500 researchers in a diversity of fields such as biomedicine, nanotechnology, chemistry, materials physics, and energy.