Diamond Light Source

Not Science Fiction, but Science Fact!

I went for a tour of the Diamond Light Source last weekend which was pretty interesting. It’s a modern synchrotron, designed to produce light for use in experiments, where “light” usually means X-Rays.

Inside it’s the usual massive engineering effort that big physics projects like this end up as: endless wires, ventilation ducts, massive steel girders, chunks of concrete, racks of electronics, lots of shiny vacuum sealed chambers and the ubiquitous many monitored control room.

What’s more interesting to me is that the exterior of the facility has been designed to look very stylish, in fact it looks more like a modern football stadium from the outside. An obvious attempt to rake in some positive PR. The other different  aspect is that now the core facility is working, producing light, it is almost a commodity, experiments pay to use one of the beam lines, to take advantage of the light source. The range of experiments ranges from physics to biology: analysing proteins to superconductivity studies.

There’s plenty of videos online and the web site has lots of information too, but I’d recommend a tour if they have another open day.