Image 3 of 3 from First Research Projects Underway at Diamond Light Source

February 7, 2007 This week marks the dawn of a new era of scientific endeavour as Diamond Light Source, the UK’s brand new synchrotron facility, opens its doors for business and welcomes its very first scientific users. Synchrotron light was first observed at General Electric, USA in 1946, but was not always considered to be such a powerful research tool, in fact particle scientists originally considered it a nuisance, as it indicated a loss of energy of accelerated particles. In the late fifties, a few visionary scientists began to recognise the potential of synchrotron light and started to investigate its powers further - nearly 50 years later, there are around 50 synchrotron facilities throughout the world with circumference ranging from 10 m to 1.3 km. Diamond uses arrays of magnets, called insertion devices, to accelerate the electrons to nearly the speed of light and focus them to generate extremely intense pin-pointed beams of synchrotron light of exceptional quality - around 100 billion times brighter than a standard hospital x-ray machine or 10 billion times brighter than the sun.