Diamond Light Source
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Diamond Light Source is a synchrotron research facility located 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.
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[edit] 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%.
[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 will be 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 lose energy by emitting synchrotron light. It is this exceptionally bright X-ray light or radiation that is 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 stations or 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 scale of a few millionths of a millimetre.
[edit] Trivia
It is said that the name DIAMOND is an acronym meaning DIpole And Multipole Output for the Nation at Daresbury. Some put forward the view that the name "Diamond" was already chosen and that this was an attempt to retro-fit an acronym, with the original name coming from the fact that just like the material diamond, the output from the synchrotron will be 'hard' (primarily in the X-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum) and bright.
Diamond's location in Oxfordshire gives it a synergy with other scientific facilities such as 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 almost 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 ISIS.
