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2nd November 2006
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Applauding the success of reaching this final milestone, the Prime Minister, Rt Hon Tony Blair MP who visited Diamond Light Source today, said "This new world-class facility shows the importance this country attaches to science and scientists. Our future prosperity rests more than ever before on the hard work and genius of our scientists and how we harness their research to deliver improvements in all our lives. This is exactly what Diamond Light Source will help us achieve in many fields, from developing new drugs to tackling climate change."
Scientists have succeeded in focussing the light source into an intensely powerful and narrow beam and channelling it to three of the seven initial experimental stations or ‘beamlines’, which represent the point at which the light can be harnessed by scientists to study the structure of matter on the nanoscale. This remarkable achievement by the Diamond team represents over four years of hard work and means that the facility is on schedule to open its doors to users in January 2007.
The first research station to reach this landmark achievement is the nanoscience beamline, led by Dr Sarnjeet Dhesi and his team. Two other research stations have since followed in their footsteps. Commenting on his achievement Dr Dhesi said, "This is great news for the science community; with the nanoscience beamline, it will be possible to analyse the properties of the surface from many different materials with extreme precision, and thereby contribute to the development of innovative materials with superior properties and performance. With the exceptional sensitivity of the light generated at Diamond, we will be able to obtain high-resolution information as a small as a few millionths of a millimetre."
If you would like high resolution images for publication, please contact Sarah Bucknall.
Diamond Light Source is the UK's national synchrotron science facility, located at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.
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