Diamond Light Source
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Diamond Light Source is a synchrotron research facility located in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. It produced its first user beam towards the end of January 2007. Diamond is being used to probe the structure and properties of many types of materials and complex structures like proteins — information that will be used by a wide range of scientists.
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[edit] Construction and finance
The Diamond Light Source is a scientific research facility built at a cost of £260m on the site of the Science and Technology Facilities Council Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, at Harwell/Chilton near Didcot in Oxfordshire, UK. It came into operation in January 2007 and was formally opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 19 October 2007. Established in March 2002, Diamond Light Source Ltd is a joint venture company funded by the UK Government via the Science and Technology Facilities Council, and by the Wellcome Trust in a ratio of 86%:14% respectively. The construction of the building and the synchrotron hall was undertaken by Costain Ltd.
[edit] 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 is used to study the structure and behaviour of many different types of matter. Electrons of 3 GeV (3 gigaelectronvolts, i.e. 3 thousand million electronvolts) 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 561.6 m circumference storage ring. As the electrons pass through the specially designed magnets they change direction, causing them to radiate. It is this exceptionally bright electromagnetic radiation that is used in a huge variety of experiments.
Diamond is housed in a silver toroidal building which covers an area approximately that of 5 football pitches, containing the storage ring and a number of experimental stations (or beamlines) where the interaction of radiation with matter is used for example to study the properties of materials. Diamond will ultimately host up to 40 such beamlines, supporting the life, physical and environmental sciences. Of these, seven were available when the facility became operational in 2007, with another 15 being built in the period 2007-2011 at an additional cost of £120m.
When Diamond opened in January 2007, seven experimental stations came online:
- 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 scale of a few millionths of a millimetre.
On September 13, 2007, scientists from the University of Cardiff, led by Professor Tim Wess, found in a that the Diamond synchrotron could be used to discover hidden content of ancient documents by illumination without opening them (penetrating layers of parchment).[1]
[edit] Background
Diamond is a UK National Facility that aims at providing researchers from the UK and the world with synchrotron-based techniques for materials sciences research.
The name DIAMOND was conceived by Mike Poole (the originator of the DIAMOND project) and arguably stood as an acronym meaning DIpole And Multipole Output for the Nation at Daresbury. An alternative and more more representative argument suggests that the name derives from the fact that the light from the synchrotron is both 'hard' (referring to the "hard" X-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum) and bright, and hence the name Diamond was born.
Diamond is located on the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory site, next to the ISIS neutron source, the Central Laser Facility, and the nearby laboratories at Harwell and Culham (including the Joint European Torus (JET) project). DIAMOND was originally due to replace the second-generation synchrotron at Daresbury in Cheshire (giving it the final 'D' in DIAMOND). However, it was decided to relocate the British synchrotron to Oxfordshire, despite the "Keep Science in the North West" campaign and potential loss of staff and expertise.
The Diamond synchrotron is the largest UK-funded scientific facility to be built in the UK for over 40 years, since the Nimrod proton synchrotron which was sited at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. In 1977 financial approval was given to convert the Nimrod facility into the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), which subsequently became the ISIS.
[edit] Controversy
Diamond was implicated in the cutbacks in physics funding that are expected in the UK[2]. The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and Diamond have both denied these allegations, and the Minister for Science and Innovation has confirmed that Diamond was built on budget and to specification (see for example this parliamentary debate [1].).
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Diamond Light Source
- Lightsources.org
- ISIS
- Science and Technology Facilities Council
- Central Laser Facility
- JET Project
- Culham Laboratories
- Harwell Laboratories
- BBC News Article
[edit] References
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