It is our great pleasure to inform you that HIBEF - Helmholtz International Beamline for Extreme Fields - continues to progress toward completion on the High Energy Density (HED) instrument of the European XFEL located in Hamburg, Germany. HIBEF (URL) will be a unique high energy density facility open to the international community. The first phase HIBEF/HED of the project (commissioning 2017-2018) will consist of a single large vacuum chamber with the following major integrated and synchronized capabilities:

A beam of Euro-XFEL at 10Hz;
A 100-Joule, 10-Hz nanosecond-pulse laser (DiPOLE, furnished by UK); 
A 150-TW, fs-pulse, 10 Hz pulse laser; 
A pulsed 50-T magnet; 
A dynamic diamond anvil in a separate chamber.

Even though XFEL itself is a European project, the HIBEF is an international XFEL User Consortium, coordinated by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), for the German Helmholtz Association (URL), with major contributions from the UK (Oxford/STFC), and many other institutions world-wide (US, China, Russia, Japan, etc.). Membership in the HIBEF User Consortium enables users to access collaborative User Consortium beamtime allocations. Hideaki (Aki) Takabe has joined HZDR and is the chairman of the Asia-Pacific consortium for HIBEF users.