Dear all,
As you may already know, the SwissSIMS lab is closed, as UNIL, until at least April 30th. The SwissSIMS schedule, originally full until late August, will thus have to be reorganized as soon as we will now when the labs could re-open. It is yet not clear when the SwissSIMS lab will reopen, but we would like to specify 2 points:
- We will first have to perform some tests, to ensure the machine is still working well after 7 weeks (or more) of shutdown
- Social distancing in our lab is hard to maintain. Late March, we were supposed to do maintenance to fix a problem affecting the measurements in Cs mode. We will have to do this maintenance before any Cs mode measurements. And this maintenance requires the presence of 2 persons. So we might be able to run only in “hyperion” mode during the first weeks of reopening, with only one person in the lab (ie, only experienced used).
For those reasons, we decided to cancel the first SwissSIMS call for proposal 2020. The persons originally scheduled until late August will be/have already been contacted and will be kept updated on the schedule. We will discuss with them the different possibilities for their session (report later, or send us the mounts + documentation, or other options)
In the meantime, please let us know if there is any “urgent” project that should be done by the end of this year (or even before, for the PhD students finishing their thesis). We’ll do a priority list and rework the schedule as best as we can.
We apologize for the inconvenience
Best wishes,
The SwissSIMS team