Natalia Dubrovinskaia and Leonid Dubrovinsky

Our friends tell us jokingly that the ESRF is our dacha, which means a summer house in Russian, because we spend so much time here. It’s not that we come for holidays, but we do come often. The truth is that we would not be able to do what we do without the ESRF. In our research we try to understand the phenomena which take place in natural or technological processes at extremes of pressure and temperature. To model such processes, we deal with very small samples, extremely fast chemical reactions or instant changes in physical properties of matter, so that our experiments require ESRF’s high-brilliance X-rays, but not only. To study the structure and electronic states of materials at extreme conditions, we also need a special sample environment equipment, which we have been developing over the years. Our portable laser heating setup and methodology of synchrotron experiments in a diamond anvil cell with double-side laser heating have been introduced at various beamlines. We also train students, who become postdocs and beamline scientists at the ESRF. Obviously, our collaboration with the ESRF has been mutually beneficial. The high pressure field has grown a lot in the last years and we do hope that the new EBS will open new opportunities for our research.”