Alfonso Franciosi President and CEO Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A. This publication reporting our activities for 2024-2025 includes contributions from work performed at the Elettra third generation synchrotron radiation facility, at the FERMI free-electron laser (FEL) facility and at a number of support laboratories collected in the same thematic sections. Scientific articles published in the last year stemming from work performed at such facilities reached a total of 533, 34 of which were based on the use of FERMI. Due to the typical lag (1.5-2 years) with which publications follow experiments, a decline of approximately 10% compared to the annual scientific productivity of 2019-2022 only partially reflects the 40% reduction in the operation of Elettra and FERMI in 2023 and 2024 caused by rising energy costs. The energy situation will improve with the new Elettra 2.0 light source coming into operation, which will consume 20% less energy than the Elettra. source The Elettra 2.0 machine, belonging to the 4th generation diffraction-limited storage ring (DLSR) class, will be housed in the existing tunnel and utilize the existing injection system, in order to minimize the required infrastructural changes, cost and installation time. Its design adopts an enhanced symmetric 6-bend achromat lattice that will allow us to achieve an horizontal bare emittance of 212 pm.rad at 2.4 GeV, i.e., 50 times lower than the present Elettra value, with a 60fold increase in the coherence fraction at 1 keV. The brilliance will increase by more than 2 orders of magnitude at 10 keV. The Elettra source has operated throughout the first semester of 2025 offering to our users 2232 hours of beamtime (i.e., 45% of the normal yearly beamtime) on 24 beamlines and was turned off for the last time on July 3rd, 2025. Removal of the Elettra components has been completed, while installation of the Elettra 2.0 components and new beamlines will continue during the "dark period". The new Elettra 2.0 source will start commissioning at the beginning of September 2026. Commissioning of the beamlines will commence in mid-November. A fist call for proposal for user experiments will be published in September 2026, and the opening of the new facility to external users will take place in January 2027 with a first set of 15 operating beamlines. The number of operating beamlines will increase to 18 by the end of 2027, to 24 by the end of 2028 and to 30 by the end of 2029. During the "dark period" Elettra users can access several new or improved off-line facilities by submitting experimental proposals to specific peer-review subpanels. The new IUVS 2.0 Laboratory is allowing inelastic scattering experiments in the ultraviolet (UV) range previously performed at the IUVS beamline to continue with substantially improved signal-to-noise ratio and resolution using a number of tunable and fixed-energy laser sources. A finely tunable UV resonance Raman (UVRR) set-up operates in the 191-315 nm and 350-475 nm wavelength ranges and will be upgraded in order to reach wavelengths below 190 nm. A second, micro-UVRR station with excitation provided by 213 nm, 224 nm and 266 nm wavelength lasers allows users to perform spatially-resolved studies with μm lateral resolution. Finally, an integrated portable deep-UV (248 nm) Raman instrument is available to perform experiments in a Biological Safety Level 3 (BSL3) facility. The upgraded SISSI off-line infrared (IR) facility is enabling users to conduct Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) imaging studies of large sample areas, also exploiting an IR tomographic setup, and sub-micrometer IR imaging of a large variety of both thin and thick samples by optical photothermal infrared (O-PTIR) correlated with Raman and fluorescence microscopy. The endstation for IR microscopy with nanometer lateral resolution continues to be operational with conventional laser source. In addition, a portable interferometer equipped with attenuated total reflection (ATR) and non-contact reflection modules is available to perform experiments on pathogens in a BSL3 facility. The number of proposals that is being received for the use of the IUVS 2.0 and SISSI off-line facilities compares well with the number of proposals that the two corresponding Elettra beamlies used to receive. The upgraded TomoLab X-ray micro computed tomography (micro-CT) facility is offering users two different micro-CT scanners and experimental set-ups. TOMO 1 is a conventional device operating in the 40-130 kVp range for 20 mmX30 mm samples, using an air-cooled sCMOS detector to yield micro-CT scans with 5-15 μm voxel size. TOMO 2 is a more complex and more flexible set-up that will reach 190 kVp, employ a variety of detectors (linear single-photon counting, large
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