On its 20th anniversary, DECTRIS extends its mission further, from detecting the invisible to transforming it into the understandable with a platform designed to connect data, analyses, compute, and scientific context into one home for modern research.

Science has changed
Over the past two decades, science has become fundamentally more complex and computational. Experiments generate unprecedented volumes of data, analysis pipelines have grown increasingly sophisticated, and research spans laboratories, institutions, and continents. Yet while the tools for generating data have evolved dramatically, the way research groups preserve and build upon scientific knowledge has not yet caught up.

Data, software, analyses, and scientific reasoning remain scattered across systems, notebooks, and conversations. Every new researcher spends time reconstructing what already exists. Every departing researcher risks taking years of expertise with them. The challenge is not only producing high quality data, it is also preserving and growing knowledge derived from the data.

The challenge is also structural. The scientific community is asked to deliver research that is FAIR — findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable — and ready for the next generation of machine learning and AI analysis. Yet most of the context that makes an experiment interpretable, such as sample provenance, instrument state, operator decisions, even failed attempts, is still scattered across lab notebooks, chat threads, and personal hard drives. The data reaches the archive. The understanding behind it rarely does.

Twenty years of enabling discovery
Founded by scientists and built on technology that enabled Nobel Prize-winning science, DECTRIS has spent twenty years helping researchers observe the world with extraordinary precision. Today its high-precision hybrid photon counting detectors power many of the world’s leading synchrotrons, electron microscopy facilities and high-end research laboratories.

DECTRIS has always worked at the boundary of the invisible, making electrons and x-ray photons that cannot be seen with the naked eye legible to science: diffraction patterns, electron scattering, atomic structure. That is the company’s founding mission, and it remains unchanged.

What twenty years alongside scientists revealed is a second boundary: the knowledge generated by those experiments was also becoming invisible, lost to departing students, scattered workflows, and analyses that could not be reproduced. The bottleneck is no longer only collecting data, but organizing, understanding, sharing, and extending the scientific work that follows every experiment.

Introducing DECTRIS D.LAB
Today, DECTRIS CLOUD evolves into DECTRIS D.LAB. Existing DECTRIS CLOUD accounts, data, and workflows carry over automatically under the new name, so current users can continue their work without interruption.

DECTRIS D.LAB represents the full completion of that journey. Where DECTRIS detectors capture what cannot otherwise be seen, DECTRIS D.LAB captures what cannot otherwise be kept: the all-in-one home for rising academic research groups. A place where data, tools, compute, analyses, decisions, and discoveries come together, a place where science connects and grows.

The platform is already in use by researchers at more than 100 academic institutions across 30 countries, validated through more than 80 conversations with research groups working with X-ray, electron microscopy, and related experimental data.

How DECTRIS D.LAB works
DECTRIS D.LAB is built around four principles that help research groups transform individual projects into durable scientific knowledge. Together, they address the full journey from raw data to reproducible, interpretable science.

One shared platform
Research no longer needs to be fragmented across instruments, storage, clusters, and laptops. DECTRIS D.LAB connects existing data sources, compute, community tools, and analyses into one shared scientific workspace, giving every project a single home and one source of truth. This is the foundation of FAIR science: a single, connected workspace where data and analyses are findable and accessible to every member of the group, and to the group leader from anywhere in the world.

Rerun, don’t rebuild
Scientific progress depends on building upon previous work. DECTRIS D.LAB preserves complete analysis environments so workflows, community tools, and previous experiments can be revisited and extended in minutes instead of being reconstructed from scratch. Reproducibility is the default, not an extra step. Every run is preserved with its complete environment, software versions, parameters, and data so any result can be independently verified.

Real-time mentorship
Scientific knowledge grows through collaboration. DECTRIS D.LAB allows group leaders, students, and collaborators to review analyses together, contribute while work is in progress, and capture discussions directly alongside the science. Decisions are documented in context and attached to the analysis task where they were made, not reconstructed from memory or buried in chat threads weeks later.

Preserve scientific memory
Methods, decisions, analyses, and context remain connected to every result. As students graduate and projects evolve, knowledge stays with the lab, allowing every generation of researchers to build on the last, rather than starting over. Provenance is complete: from sample origin to instrument state to analysis decisions. Every piece of context that makes data interpretable stays connected to the data itself.

What this enables
Whether processing electron microscopy data, analyzing diffraction experiments, or developing new computational methods, DECTRIS D.LAB brings the entire scientific workflow together. Researchers can connect instruments, launch analyses on local clusters or cloud compute, reuse community workflows, collaborate across teams, and preserve complete scientific provenance from raw data to publication.

For principal investigators, DECTRIS D.LAB provides visibility into ongoing work and enables real-time mentorship, from anywhere, at any time. For PhDs and postdoctoral researchers, it removes the burden of rebuilding environments and makes previous work immediately accessible and reusable. For power users and method developers, it provides an open platform where workflows can be shared, cited, and adopted by the wider community.

Built on open standards with open formats, standard containers, portable workflows. The result is research that is not only more efficient, but structurally FAIR: ready to be found, understood, and built upon by the next generation of scientists.

Looking ahead
For twenty years, DECTRIS has helped scientists generate better data. The next twenty years are about helping scientific knowledge permeate and grow across generations. Every experiment should become a foundation for the next discovery, every workflow should remain available, and every research group should have a place where its science connects and grows.

DECTRIS has spent twenty years at the front of science, at the detector, where data is born. DECTRIS D.LAB extends that presence all the way to understanding: where data becomes knowledge, and knowledge outlasts the people who created it.

“For two decades, our focus at DECTRIS has been on resolving even the weakest signals and capturing extraordinary data. With DECTRIS D.LAB, we are now taking the next step to ensure these signals translate seamlessly into real insights. Because true research shouldn’t stop at the detector – it should leave a solid foundation for the next generation of researchers to build upon. DECTRIS D.LAB is where that legacy is built.” – Stefan Brandstetter, Ph.D., CCO, DECTRIS