Full house at Swedish Big Science Forum 2026

The forum took place at The Loop in Lund, located between the large Big Science facilities ESS and MAX IV. The programme began with study visits to the two facilities before the conference officially opened at lunchtime with an exhibition and networking.

Catarina Sahlberg, Director of Big Science Sweden, and Amelie Hallin, External Relations Manager, opened the forum and energised the audience for two days of networking and collaboration. 

Amelie Hallin had Maja Olvegård (Uppsala University) and Matthew Lawson (Savantic AI Lab) on stage, representing academia and industry.

Swedish companies, universities, and institutes stand side by side with Europe’s major Big Science facilities and projects.

Lunch-to-lunch

During the two days, participants took part in technical seminars, company pitches, one-to-one meetings and networking sessions. A central meeting place was the Big Science Technology Exhibition, where Swedish companies, universities and research institutes showcased technologies and expertise alongside representatives from major Big Science facilities such as CERN, ESS, European XFEL, FAIR/GSI, Fusion for Energy, EISCAT and the European Solar Telescope.

Swedish companies presented their key competencies in short pitches and were easy to meet, with facilities, researchers and companies gathered in one place.

Jörgen Rogstam (EKA)

Elin Cartwright (Abstract)

Participants could also join technical seminars highlighting real projects and current challenges from Big Science facilities and projects.

Eshraq Al-Dmour (MAX IV Laboratory)

Stefan Wikman (Fusion for Energy)

Richard Jacobsson (CERN)

Mini AIMday Big Science Technology

The programme concluded with the Mini AIMday Big Science Technology sessions, where companies and researchers worked together to address concrete technical challenges presented by MAX IV and IFMIF-DONES, with the aim of identifying innovative solutions. The challenges in short were cryogenic instrumentation and precision monitoring, ceramics for high-performance ion sources, and high-speed imaging and data acquisition systems.

An efficient meeting place

Many participants highlighted the forum as an efficient meeting place for connecting industry, research and international Big Science facilities.

Johannes Gutleber, senior researcher at CERN and a key person in the Future Circular Collider project, commented after the event on LinkedIn:

“Thanks to Big Science Sweden for organising this meeting. It is very effective to get in touch with many people from many different domains in a short amount of time. And most of all, I met super friendly people and had a lot of fun exchanging and creating new contacts. This creates a real community.”

Moments from the forum