Scientific Landscape
Our outstanding research infrastructures attract talents from all over the world to our Centers and are the basis for numerous international collaborations.
Accelerators, experimental facilities, research ships or supercomputers - large-scale research infrastructures represent a crucial basis for scientific progress in addressing global challenges.
The development, construction and operation of complex research infrastructures for an international user community is a core element in the mission of the Helmholtz Association. Our research facilities exemplify the division of tasks in the German science system and cooperation with German and foreign universities and research institutions.
More than ten thousand external scientists from over thirty nations work with our research infrastructures every year, in situ or remote.
Foreign scientists and visiting scientists at Helmholtz (as of 2019)
Our scientists design and construct our own research infrastructures together with experts from all over the world - this is how Helmholtz and its international partners benefit from the exchange of knowledge. Thus, our facilities are strategically important crystallisation nuclei for international research cooperation. We are also significantly involved in several internationally-operated large-scale research infrastructures in Germany and abroad, such as the X-ray laser European XFEL at DESY, the particle accelerator FAIR at GSI or the European Spallation Source in Lund, in which Forschungszentrum Jülich is involved in its design.
The page research infrastructures provides an overview of the most important large-scale research infrastructures of the Helmholtz Association, including mainly classic user facilities that offer dedicated user operation for third parties, i.e. for scientists from Germany or abroad (mostly from universities or non-university research institutions).
