With this petition the Hungarian Synchrotron Committee, the body standing for Hungarian synchrotron and free-electron-laser users is applying to the Government of Hungary and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to stop Hungary's withdrawal from ESRF.

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France is the most powerful X-ray light source in Europe. The joint research infrastructure is presently supported by 21 countries and hosts more than 6000 visiting scientists each year. Its more than 40 specialised experimental stations serve research and development in engineering and physical sciences, life sciences, humanities, technology, medicine and other fields. In addition, ESRF is a unique education and training site as well as an exceptional knowledge centre.

Hungary concluded its first agreement with ESRF granting access to the facility for Hungarian users in 2000. Since 2008, along with the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary has become part of the Centralsync consortium, a Scientific Associate of ESRF. Hungary’s membership fee was 0.25 % of the ESRF budget, i.e. about 245 thousand euros per year.

Since 1995, Hungarian scientists have been using ESRF in an ever-increasing extent. The scientific papers published in the period 2012–2014 based on ESRF experiments with Hungarian participation came from 19 different research groups of universities and research institutes and include life sciences, materials sciences, chemistry, solid-state physics, environmental sciences and general physics. The capabilities of ESRF cannot be replaced by those of laboratory infrastructures available in Hungary.

Financing difficulties started in 2011. After a discussion, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences guaranteed to cover the Hungarian membership fee until 30 June 2013. In spite of major efforts of the Hungarian synchrotron user community, presently no funding body in Hungary is willing to cover Hungary’s membership fee to ESRF beyond this date, although in the research infrastructure annex of its smart specialisation strategy (S3) published on 3 November 2014, the Government of Hungary guaranteed paying the ESRF membership fee in 2015. Indeed, the note in page 24 of the above document reads: “We note that the government guarantees the costs for joining and participating in the following infrastructures in the budget of next year: CERN, CERN ALICE, CERN CMS, ESS, ILL, ESRF”. Accordingly, ESRF has been even recently generously granting access to its beamlines for Hungarian scientists. The change in the position of its research funding bodies practically means Hungary's withdrawal from ESRF, a step having dramatic consequences:

• Hungarian scientists will lose access to ESRF, a fact spoiling many ongoing research projects;
• Synchrotron users are the natural candidates for doing research at unique pulsed X-ray sources like X-ray free-electron lasers and extreme-intensity lasers. Hungary is a full member of the European XFEL (Germany, Hamburg) with a membership fee about 8 times higher than that of ESRF. Furthermore, Hungary is hosting one of the pillars of the Extreme Light Infrastructure, the ELI-ALPS facility being under implementation in Szeged with a construction budget of more than 200 million euros. By withdrawing from ESRF, it will no longer be possible to train future Hungarian users for the European XFEL and the ELI-ALPS.
• The consortium Centralsync will be discontinued, a fact causing major difficulties in accessing ESRF for users from the Czech Republic and Slovakia;
• The international trustworthiness of the Hungarian research policy will be radically undermined.

With this petition the Hungarian Synchrotron Committee, the body standing for Hungarian synchrotron and free-electron-laser users is applying to research-policy makers of its country to stop Hungary's withdrawal from ESRF.

We invite all scientists in Hungary, Europe and all over the world who feel concerned about Hungary’s ongoing withdrawal from ESRF to sign this petition in order to keep the Hungarian synchrotron users community within the European synchrotron radiation network. Furthermore, we ask you to disseminate this call among your colleagues whom you think may support our petition.