Infra-structure and operation of the Swiss-Norwegian Beamlines (SNBL) at ESRF, Grenoble, France

SNBL (See description in Annex 1) has been in operation from the summer of 1995. The Swiss party has financed 71% of the costs while NSF has financed 29%. In October 2001 Switzerland started operating her own synchrotron radiation facility, called the Swi ss Light Source (SLS), and the Swiss party will reduce their financing of SNBL to 50%, starting from the budget year 1 October 2002-30 September 2003. This means that NSF must either increase its share of the funding up to 50%, or one or several of the instruments at SNBL must be taken out of operation. Based on a survey (Annex 2, in Norwegian, English headlines) of the plans for the coming years of the various research groups using SNBL/ESRF, NSF is negotiating a prolongation of an agreement on the operation of SNBL with the Swiss party, based on a 50 /50 financing. This means an increase in the Norwegian financing from about 1,8 million NOK to 3,5 million NOK per year. NSF is applying for 0,75 million NOK per year from FUGE in the period 2002-2006 in order to secure the use of the SNBL-instruments as a technology platform for Norwegian researchers at Norwegian universities and other research institutions. An overwiew of the scientific production by Norwegian research groups utilizing SNBL/ESRF is given in Annex 3.