Diamond Light Source
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Diamond Light Source is a synchrotron research facility located on the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, England. It is currently under construction and is expected to come into operation in 2007. When completed, Diamond will be used to probe the structure and properties of many types of material — information that will be used by a wide range of scientists.
Construction and Finance
The Diamond Light Source is a scientific research facility under construction at a cost of £250m on the site of the CCLRC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, at Harwell/Chilton near Didcot in Oxfordshire, UK. It is due to come into operation in 2007. Diamond Light Source Ltd is funded by the UK Government via CCLRC, and by the Wellcome Trust. This Joint Venture Company was established in March 2002 to build and operate the facility, and it is funded by its two Shareholders CCLRC:Wellcome Trust in a ratio of 86%:14%.
The Synchrotron
DIAMOND generates synchrotron light (also called synchrotron radiation, which is the electromagnetic radiation emitted by charged particles which are moving near to the speed of light, at wavelengths from X-rays to the far infrared; this synchrotron light will be used to study the structure and behaviour of many different types of matter. Electrons of 3 GeV (3 Giga electron volts, i.e. 3 thousand million volts) are generated from a series of pre-accelerator stages (electron gun, 100 MeV linear accelerator, and 100 MeV - 3 GeV booster synchrotron) prior to injection into the 561.8 m circumference storage ring. As the electrons pass through the specially designed magnets they lose energy by emitting synchrotron light. It is this exceptionally bright light/x-rays that are used in a huge variety of complex experiments.
Diamond is housed in a silver toroidal building which covers the area of 5 football pitches, containing the storage ring and a number of experimental beamlines where the interaction of radiation with matter will provide evidence for the properties of many materials. Diamond may ultimately host up to 40 such beamlines, supporting the life, physical and environmental sciences. Of these, seven will be available when the facility becomes operational in 2007, with another 15 being built in the period 2007-2011 at an additional cost of £120m.
When Diamond opens in 2007, the seven experimental stations that will come online are:
- Extreme conditions beamline for studying materials under intense temperatures and pressures.
- Materials and magnetism beamline, set up to probe electronic and magnetic materials at the atomic level.
- Three macromolecular crystallography beamlines, for decoding the structure of complex biological samples, such as proteins.
- Microfocus spectroscopy beamline, able to map the chemical make up of complex materials, such as moon rocks and geological samples.
- Nanoscience beamline, capable of imaging structures and devices at the few millionths of a millimetre.
Trivia
The DIAMOND facility was originally planned to be at the CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory site in Daresbury, Cheshire, the acronym meaning DIpole And Multipole Output for the Nation at Daresbury, which of course was made to fit the acronym. Like the material diamond, the output from the synchrotron will be 'hard' (primarily in the X-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum) and bright. Partially due to the involvement of the Wellcome Trust and the link of Government funding of the project with its French counterpart, SOLEIL, the decision was made in 2001 to move the siting of DIAMOND to the other main CCLRC site at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. This generated controversy, partly because the switch meant that the new jobs would be created in an already more affluent region of the UK.The DIAMOND synchrotron is the largest UK-funded scientific facility to be built for over 30 years.
See also
External link
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