ISIS@MACH ITALIA, a Multidisciplinary User Facility in Italy from life science to engineering (A. Cianchi)

The multidisciplinary IM@IT has catalysed the creation of a multi-site collaboration of twenty-eight Medium Range Facilities – which are more specialised collections of equipment – (see document Annex – MRFs) and one hundred and thirty Small Research Facilities – of which many universities will have some, but not all – (see document Annex – SRFs). Without IM@IT, these would not have been realised.

Through synergistic research activities among MRFs, SRFs, and Large Scale Facilities (LSFs) – highly specialised infrastructures operated nationally or internationally, IM@IT operates a multi-level Transnational Access (TA) program for users from both academia and industry. The TA program enables the multidisciplinary community – from life sciences to engineering – to take full advantage of the very significant investments made by European Countries in LSFs, which are not always fully geared to support national priorities.

A key point is the recognition of a natural hierarchy of need/productivity in which users become familiar with different techniques at SFRs/MRFs, before progressing to more complex RIs and becoming LSFs expert users. This hierarchy applies not only to a given research question, but also to training and education of novice users in accessing the more advanced and more expensive methods. Research carried out at the European RIs needs to be constantly nourished with new users and new research and innovative ideas. However, for users having little or no experience in the use of the analytical tools required to exploit MRFs and LSFs there is a steep learning curve to develop proficiency in their use. Many researchers, if they do not have prior experience, find that the highly competitive access to LSFs is a high barrier. IM@IT is contributing to reduce this barrier, which benefits the research but also enables Italy to get better value from those LSF that it contributes to financially such as ISIS, the ILL (Institute Laue Langevin), and ESS (Lund).

In this context a particularly unique feature of IM@IT is that it provides users with a research pipeline from SRFs to MRFs and then to LSFs, and greatly enhances the deployment of user’s multi-disciplinary research ideas, which will then have better access to the European LSFs and in turn enrich their impact.