Welcome to DAPHNE

Photons and neutrons play a key role to gain insight into the structure of matter and into the fundamental relationships in nature. Basic research using photons and neutrons, development of new methods, the large scale facilities like synchrotron radiation sources, neutron sources, and free electron lasers plays a tremendous role in this context, because this is the starting point for technical innovation and the sustainable development of the economy and society. Hence, the photon and neutron science community encompasses scientists from a broad range of scientific disciplines not only from physics but also chemistry, biology, materials science or life sciences. Now we face a new challenge: a strong need for joint high-level, rapid data analysis, need for re-usability of data and data repositories and thus the common development of a research data management. The DAPHNE4NFDI consortium now aims at exploiting the new possibilities, tools and infrastructures that the digital transformation offers.

The DAPHNE4NFDI community comprises more than 5500 scientists throughout Germany represented by the KFS and KFN. In fact, there are many more users within these areas, e.g. solid state physicists, molecular /atomic physicists, protein crystallographers, chemists, scientists in catalysis, life sciences, materials sciences, archeology and many other areas. The users produce ca. 28 PB of data per year, which are once again used by a wider science community from which the users come. Individual experiments can produce millions of files and in some cases over 1 PB data per week, depending on the experimental configuration. Moreover, the community is currently witnessing a fundamental change in both the amount of data recorded and the corresponding data rates triggered by the increase in the brightness of the sources themselves (x-ray free-electron lasers, high-brightness storage rings and new neutron facilities) and by the rapid increase in the size and speed of modern detectors.

Uniquely, DAPHNE4NFDI engages directly with the user community to develop user-driven data solutions to advance science experiments. Broadly, we will provide the following tangible infrastructure through DAPHNE4NFDI for the wider photon and neutron community:

1. Improve metadata capture through consistent workflows supported by user-driven online logbooks that are linked to the data collection, thus enabling a richer capture of information about the experiments than is currently possible;
2. Establish a community repository of processed data, new reference databases and analysis code for published results, linked, where possible, to raw data sources, to sustainably improve access to research data and enable data and software re-use;
3. Develop, curate and deploy user-developed analysis software on facility computing infrastructure so that ordinary users can benefit from and repeat the analysis performed by leading power user groups through common data analysis portals.

The consortium thus aims at a national research data infrastructure along a process chain from the proposal, the experiment, data recorded, stored, analysed and interpreted. This is a very ambitious endeavor. But the consortium already builds on a very strong experience with the IT centres at the large-scale facilities, many activities in data analysis, data catalogues and repositories at the universities and research institutes and the development of metadata standards and quality control. DAPHNE4NDFI wants to bundle all these activities. Hence, DAPHNE4NFDI consortium consists of experts from the photon (KFS) and neutron community (KFN), experts from the different science fields and techniques (diffraction, spectroscopy, imaging, etc.) at universities, research institutes and large scale facilities and strongly interacts among the user and scientists at large scale infrastructures as well as with other NFDI-consortia.

If you are interested in joining this initiative from the first moment, please contact us!