The Synchrotron Light Source PETRA III is one of the core facilities at DESY offering each year more than 2000 users unique opportunities for experiments with hard X-rays of a very high brilliance. The light source is operated mainly in two operation modes with 480 and 40 bunches at a beam energy of 6 GeV. The availability and failure statistics is reviewed for the year 2022 in comparison with previous years. Studies at PETRA III are supporting the technical design phase for the planned upgrade PETRA IV. Several diagnostic devices have been tested and the installation of a cavity has been prepared. Furthermore, the operation of PETRA III at 5 GeV has been studied with the goal to reduce the electric power consumption of the accelerator. But a 5 GeV test run for all beam lines at PETRA III showed that this operation mode is impairing the experimental opportunities due to the lower brilliance and photon flux for hard X-rays.

The system in place for remote alignment of the girders, which carry the storage ring elements of the PETRA III light source in the Max von Laue experimental hall, were never used to perform re-alignments after the initial installation of the storage ring in 2009. Since the planned upgrade, PETRA IV, can benefit from the fine control of the girder position to achieve the design beam performance, a movement test of one of the PETRA III girders was performed in December 2022. The ability to safely and precisely remote control the equipment was demonstrated and the accuracy of the optics model that describes the effect of the girder movement on the orbit could be evaluated. The findings of this experiment are summarized in this paper.

One of the interesting topics among accelerator physicists in the last decades has been the resistive wall impedance of vacuum chambers with general cross sections. The resistive wall impedance of a round pipe was calculated more than half a century ago, followed by parallel plates, rectangular pipes, and, in more recent years, oval shapes. Analytical solutions usually require some approximations to simplify them. It is possible to solve Maxwell's equations in the vacuum chamber with simulation codes in order to obtain an exact solution for Resistive wall impedance. Although some of them show promising results, the need for a versatile code that can calculate resistive wall impedance and wakefield in a general cross-section vacuum chamber is still necessary. VACI-suite is a finite element solver that tries to solve this problem. Compared to well-known theories and simulation codes for well-known geometries, the code's results show remarkable agreement.