Blog: Diamond Light Facilities Tour

The UK Space Agency's Space Sustainability team were recently delighted to be invited to join a tour of the Diamond Light Source facility at Harwell by our colleagues in Education and Future Workforce.  

The Sustainability team joined Agency colleagues on a tour of the Diamond Light facility.

Nestled in the heart of the Harwell Science and Innovation campus, also home to the UK Space Agency's head-quarters, the Diamond Light facility is a striking and hard to miss stadium-shaped building more than half a kilometre in circumference, which houses the UK’s national synchrotron.

Unlike many synchrotrons, which act as particle colliders, the Diamond Light facility harnesses the power of its electron beam to generate high intensity electromagnetic radiation whis is then used, like a giant microscope, to study samples of anything from fossils to jet engines to viruses or vaccines.

A model of the facility shows the various "beamlines" positioned tangentially to the path around which the electrons travel at close to the speed of light, giving off light 10 billion times brighter than the sun.

Always keen to make connections with our colleagues across the campus, the Sustainability team jumped at the chance to learn more about what goes on inside the facility.  We were treated to a quick physics refresher, a brief history lesson, and some intriguing information about the construction of the facility.  Due to the sensitivity of the equipment it has to be insulated from vibrations from sources such as nearby roads, which presents challenges when construction work is carried out elsewhere on campus, which is a regular occurrence at present.  

Rather than travelling in a circular path, the Diamond Light synchrotron is a 50-sided polygon, known as a pentacontagon.  At each corner of the polygon the path of the beam of electrons is bent by powerful electromagnets, causing the emission of electromagnetic radiation which passes through an optics hutch, where it is filtered to select the frequency and focused onto the sample in the experimental lab. Here the radiation can be used for imaging, diffraction or spectroscopy, across a vast range of scientific areas, including health and medicine, nanotechnology, food science, forensics, archaeology, engineering, and earth and environmental sciences.  It has even been used to investigate moon rock samples returned to Earth by the Apollo space missions. 

A variety of large magnets are used to direct the electron beam on its path around the synchrotron.  

The scale of the facility is impressive to behold, with the vast Experimental Hall housing the individual cabins which in turn house the various optics hatches and experimental labs, stretching away into the distance. 

The Diamond Light Facility Experimental Hall.  The large yellow boxes are lead-lined hutches which house optical and experimental equipment.

We were lucky enough to visit during a time when the beam was shut down for maintenance, so were able to take a peek inside the area where the beam circulates in a narrow metal tube, and were assured there was no radiation risk, despite the numerous warning signs.

 
Warning sign on the entry to the storage ring area & Equipment inside the storage ring area.

Diamond Light is a Government funded facility, and we were fascinated to learn that it is free for academic users who have had their beamtime proposal accepted by an external body of scientific advisors. Only a small percentage (10%) of Diamond’s beamtime is available for fee-paying industry users.

For more information about the Diamond Light facility, check out their website.