Extra cash for 'super-microscope'
The Diamond synchrotron being built in Oxfordshire in southern England is to receive a further £120m of funding.
The £500m project is one of the biggest science facilities ever constructed in the UK and will use super-bright X-rays to probe the structure of matter.

Scientists say the new understanding to come out of Diamond will help them design new medicines and high-tech materials, among many other advances.

The new money has been announced by science minister Lord Sainsbury.

It comes jointly from the government, the Wellcome Trust medical charity and five of the Research Councils, the agencies which publicly fund British science.

Big ring

The extra investment will allow the Oxfordshire science centre to be extended, to run many more experiments.

The Diamond synchrotron is a machine which could be described as a sort of "super microscope". It will be housed in a giant doughnut-shaped building over half a kilometre in circumference, covering the size of five football pitches.
At its heart is a ring-shaped evacuated tube that is surrounded by magnets. These bend and focus a beam of electrons travelling at close to the speed of light.

The intense ultraviolet beams and X-rays this process produces can penetrate deep into a material and reveal its internal structure.

This information helps scientists to better understand the fundamental workings of matter - such as biological tissues, polymers and catalysts - at the atomic and molecular level.

Extended scope

For example, if researchers can picture the precise structures of proteins - the large molecules that build and maintain our bodies - they can begin to develop ways to manipulate them; to design drugs that act on the molecules in very specific ways.


The individual experiments are to be done at the end of individual "beamlines". The new money announced by Lord Sainsbury will enable the development of an additional 14 experimental stations by 2012.
It is envisaged that Diamond, which is sited on the Chilton-Harwell science campus, will eventually have 30 beamlines.

The decision to site the synchrotron in Oxfordshire caused a major row in 2000.

Politicians from the northwest of England felt the new generation machine should have gone to an existing centre at Daresbury.

( Artist impressions by JacobsGIBB Ltd/Crispin WrideArchitectural Design Studio. )

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