A good morning for PETRA IV

3rd parliamentary breakfast with members of the German Bundestag on 27 June

The calendars of members of the Bundestag are extremely full – it's hard to get an appointment with them. That means that an oft-used format is the parliamentary breakfast in Berlin, 7:45 am each morning. In addition to coffee and sandwiches, DESY's PETRA IV team served the MPs news about PETRA IV and thanked them for the start-up funding of 40 million euros.

The burning question that concerns all those responsible at DESY: how can we work together with politicians to create the conditions for obtaining authorisation for PETRA IV? Early in the morning on 27 June, 13 members of the German Bundestag and seven staff members from the government and opposition parliamentary groups came to the meeting room of the Paul Löbe House to talk to Beate Heinemann, Helmut Dosch and Arik Willner from the DESY Directorate.

"Regular dialogue with political decision-makers is central to our work," says Katharina Scheffler, who is responsible for political communication in the Directorate office. "In personal dialogue, the relevance of PETRA IV to society as a whole can be demonstrated even better and we can respond directly to the MPs' questions."

With short pitches on the importance of PETRA IV, there was support from Katharina Fegebank, 2nd Mayor and Senator for Science in Hamburg, Holger Hanselka, President of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, and Blanche Schwappach-Pignataro, Dean of the University Hospital UKE.

"It is very pleasing that so many elected officials have once again found the time to find out about the current status of PETRA IV," says Heidrun Hillen, DESY's PR officer for large-scale research facilities. "This shows that we have political support for our project."