Saint protects European XFEL tunnel
 |
  |
| Photos courtesy of Ilka Flegel | |
To the sound of a traditional German miners' song, the two tunnel builders were lifted up to a shrine on the wall directly above the giant tunnel boring machine. They gently placed a wooden statue of St. Barbara into the shrine.
Applause erupted from the 250 guests below— tunnel builders, scientists, politicians, and nearby residents. Hamburg's and Schleswig-Holstein's state ministers for science, Herlind Gundelach and Cordelia Andreßen, took scissors from a red cushion and cut the ribbons to inaugurate the project. The breaking of champagne bottles against the wall of the construction pit and the boring machine christened the newest construction phase of the European XFEL, a new X-ray free-electron laser in Hamburg, Germany.
It was the second time the XFEL's tunnel builders had called upon St. Barbara, patron of miners and others who work with explosives, to protect them from the dangers of their work. Miners in many countries pay homage to St. Barbara; Germany has a particularly strong tradition that plays an important role for miners and tunnel builders.
Before two boring machines broke ground to carve the 5.8-kilometer tunnel system between the accelerator laboratory DESY and the town of Schenefeld, celebrations honored this decades-old custom. A June 2010 ceremony christened the first, 71-meter-long machine, whose cutter head measures 6.17 meters in diameter. Its smaller counterpart, with a 5.48-meter cutter head, was christened in December and powered up in early January 2011.
Gundelach and Andreßen, the state ministers for science, took on the role of patronesses for the tunnels excavated by the two machines. Workers regard patronesses as the earthly representatives of St. Barbara during the construction period, and name the tunnels after them. The patronesses agree to watch over the tunnel builders and oversee celebrations such as the festival of St. Barbara.
St. Barbara willing, the European XFEL project expects to finish construction and begin research operation in 2015. It will provide extremely intense X-ray flashes to help map atomic details of viruses and cell composition and film chemical reactions, an ability that not too many decades ago would have been considered miraculous.
Ilka Flegel
Click here to download the pdf version of this article.
