Slashdot Mirror
Giant Synchrotron to be Constructed in UK
juntunen writes "According to the BBC, construction will start this week on Diamond: a £500 million synchrotron in Oxfordshire at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. These facilities are crucial to a deep understanding of structure in matter. With all the new emphasis on biotechnology, demand will certainly be high. Diamond has its own homepage, and the Accelerator Physics Group has publicly available tech notes."
Daresbury in addition to being the birthplace of Lewis Carrol (Charles Luttwidge Dodgson -- there's a neat stained glass window in the church where his father was vicar) was also the site of the first dedicated storage ring for generating synchrotron radiation (i.e. polarized light from IR to hard X-ray).
Originally the site was created to extend particle physics in the North of England (to include a collaboration of the "northern universities": Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Hull. A particle physics 5GeV electron synchrotron called NINA was built there in the early to mid 1970s and did some useful work.
It also attracted a new group of condensed matter physicists (surface scientists too) who used the synchrotron radiation emitted to do spectroscopy and diffraction of various sorts (photelectron spectrosocopy in the extreme UV and soft X-ray where the SR sources are particularly bright compared to other sources). They set up the SRF to try out these ideas.
The NSF (Nuclear Structure Facility -- for doing energetic heavy ion collisions -- nothing to do with nuclear weapons!) was built there in the late 1970s. That's the tower you can see in the site pictures. Unfortunatly SERC killed nuclear structure work in the UK in 1990. They pulled funding for the NSF and told people to look for beamtime at other sites outside the country. In fact the Recoil Seperator ended up at Oak Ridge, TN (so they didn't keep that expertise in the country).
http://www.srs.ac.uk/srs/
NINA was decomissioned in the late 1970s and it was decided to build the Synchrotron Radition Source (SRS) using part of the old NINA site (and the NINA linac, I think) to provide a dedicated SR source in the UK for chemists, biologists, martials scientists and physicists.
All though this time a theory group was based there and a large regional computing facility (that used to have a Cray 1 in the good old days from 1979 to 1983) that was a major node on JANET (the academic network in the UK).
The SRS was comissioned in 1982. This is where the 20 years mentioned in the article comes in -- opened in 1982 and closed in 2003(ish). I not sure if they'll keep the SRS open although the parameters for the SRS and DIAMOND are rather different. DIAMOND is good for high brightness X-ray studies but not so good for soft X-ray or XUV uses.
I worked there as a (suface science) grad student (from Liverpool University) and got my PhD working on the TGM and GIM and SEXAFS stations on beamline 6 and later did some work on Beanline 1 when I worked at the Surface Science Center at Liverpool University.
The site had a lot of experitise for machine physics (the epople who understand how to keep the electrons going around the ring), beamline and monochromator design. I suspect some of these will move down south and another nothern resource will be lost.
I'm sure the RAL people are happy (the decision as made almost 2 years ago) but they don't have a site who boundary is formed by the Bridgewater Canal. Perhaps it's heading the same way as that old tech.
Kevin Purcell
Beamline 6 (and 1)
University of Liverpool.