The Spanish material science community celebrated a major milestone today with the inauguration of In-CAEM (In situ Correlative Facility for Advanced Energy Materials) at the ALBA Synchrotron. While the facility is poised to revolutionize the development of environmentally sustainable technologies such as green hydrogen, advanced batteries or solar panels, its success relies heavily on a critical backbone: advanced data processing provided by PIC.
In-CAEM is designed to observe materials at the atomic scale under real operating conditions (“operando”). However, the true innovation lies in its correlative analysis capabilities. By combining state-of-the-art microscopy with synchrotron light, researchers can view materials through multiple technological lenses simultaneously. This approach will generate an unprecedented volume of complex, multi-layered data that will require fast, high-performance data processing to be analyzed.
This is where the role of PIC becomes decisive. As a key partner in the consortium with ALBA, ICN2 and ICMAB, PIC has engineered the integration of scientific instrumentation directly with high-performance data analysis resources. This infrastructure ensures that the massive data streams generated by the new microscopes and beamlines are not just stored, but efficiently processed and analyzed alongside complex simulations.
This seamless connection between large-scale experimental infrastructure and digital analysis addresses one of the biggest challenges in modern science: big data management. By bridging the gap between the laboratory and the supercomputing facility, PIC ensures that In-CAEM can function not just as an imaging platform, but as a high-speed analytical engine, accelerating the research on new materials, essential for the global energy transition.