Diamond Light Source
From Free net encyclopedia
The Dimond Light Source is a synchrotron research facility located at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, England. It is currently under construction and is expected to come into operation in 2007. When completed, Dimond 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.
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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 it's two Shareholders CCLRC:Wellcome Trust in a ratio of 86%:14%.
The Synchrotron
Its synchrotron light radiation source will emit "light", or electromagnetic radiation, at wavelengths from X-rays to far infrared that will be used to study the structure and behaviour of many different types of matter. Electrons are accelerated in a magnetic field and in a vacuum and will be fed into a storage ring 561.6m in circumference. The energy of the electrons in the storage ring will be 3GeV (3 Giga electron volts, i.e. 3 thousand million volts). 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 synchrotron ring and a number of research beamlines where the interaction of radiation with matter will provide evidence for the properties of many materials. Diamond may ultimately host up to 40 research stations, 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 facility was originally planned to be at the CCLRC laboratory in Daresbury, and was to be called DIAMOND which was an acronym for Dipole and monopole source at Daresbury. Some argue that the name "Diamond" was already chosen and that there was an attempt to retro-fit an acronym. They also argue that Diamond will be able to produce very bright and 'hard x-rays' and that this was the real origin of the name (i.e. "hard" and "bright" equals diamond). Whatever the truth of the origin of the name, the plans were changed and Diamond was sited at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. 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.