12th Workshop on Accelerator Operations

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility - Extremely Brilliant Source (ESRF-EBS) is a facility upgrade allowing its scientific users to take advantage of the first high-energy 4th generation light source. In December 2018, after 30 years of operation, the beam stopped for a 12-month shutdown to dismantle the old storage ring and to install the new X-ray source. In December 2019, first beam was stored and accumulated in the storage ring, allowing the vacuum conditioning and tuning to be started. Beam was delivered to beamlines in March 2020 for their commissioning. On 25 August 2020, the user programme was restarted with beam parameters very close to nominal values. Since then, the ESRF operates for the user-community with high performance and availability.
In this presentation the milestones and key aspects of the commissioning and the return to user-mode operation despite the Covid-19 pandemic are presented and discussed.