Diamond Annual Review 2023/24

4 D I A M O N D L I G H T S O U R C E A N N U A L R E V I E W 2 0 2 3 / 2 4 CEOWelcome I nmy first year as Chief Executive Officer and being in this leadership position for just over sixmonths, I continue to be so impressed and amazed at the drive and dedication of everyone involved with Diamond. I am grateful to AndreaWard and the wider executive teamwho provided a strong transition for the leadership of the organisation upon the departure of Andrew Harrison in autumn 2022. I also thank Sir Adrian Smith for his decade at the helm of the Diamond Board where he ensured Diamond’s strong position with the UK government stakeholders. They all helped me focus onmy engagement with staff, users and funders and on learning about Diamond. In the first few months, this learning phase of my new role brought me to meet staff across the organisation. I saw the engagement and dedication of staff, too often unnoticed, how pleased staff were for the opportunity to meet me, and I also heard and saw the challenges we face. I also communicated with staff, the Diamond committees and the users what the initial priorities have been. The real journey to tackle the many challenges ahead has already begun. For example, there are significant budgetary pressures on our operations, a focus on recruitment and retention, and the current cost of living and financial climate we work within; all of which pose challenges to our operations. We therefore have to seek the necessary funding to sustain the UK ambitions to be a world science and technology superpower, while adapting our operations to be supporting our dedicated and talented staff. We aim to be more agile and prioritise what we do and communicate effectively across the organisation.We are also in a transition period with changes in our Board of Directors coming within the next few months as highlighted by Sir Adrian Smith, Chair of the Diamond Board in the foreword section. We will have to work to ensure that Diamond remains a priority with our funding agencies. With this in mind, I state my commitment to the entire Diamond community that I will drive the best decisions I can to address one by one each of those challenges. Now reflecting on themany successes, the past year sawus in the headlines like never before with the amazing Sir David Attenborough presenting Dinosaurs: The Final Day - a documentary programme first aired in the UK. This was also eventually released to millions of fans worldwide in 2023 under a new title of Dinosaur Apocalypse, and the programme featured measurements undertaken at Diamond. Later in the autumn another heritage story made the headlines with the Herculaneum scrolls first words being uncovered thanks to industry beamtime at Diamond. Early in 2024, I was impressed to see a long- standing citizen science project featured in the Guardian, Independent and many other outlets, with the results from the project being published in one of the Royal Society of Chemistry titles. The authors explained how researchers rallied hundreds of school pupils and science teachers at UK schools, using the similarities in the labs and environmental conditions, and this, to solve the bottleneck of preparing the samples! Beyond the headlines and the elation they produce, we have also celebrated the milestone of the 13,000th published journal article last December with a paper on Fischer−Tropsch Synthesis Catalysts. The work presented measurements on nanoparticles at such precision that researchers were able to gain insights into potential avenues for improving the performance of the catalyst. Another major milestone was the antibody work developed as a complementary therapy for COVID-19 alongside vaccination, work that resulted in patent now taken forward as part of the Astra Zeneca suite of treatments. This Annual Report contains many more examples of high impact science drawn from across the broad range of areas of fundamental science that Diamond serves, and the societal challenges it helps address. These include health and wellbeing, the environment, transport and energy challenges of the future, as well as new functional materials, including electronic devices and high-performance engineering alloys, and new processing technology for innovative manufacturing. All of these achievements reflect the skills, hard work and commitment of the dedicated staff of TeamDiamond. They also reflect the strong engagement of a vibrant and growing user community in academia and industry. In the last budget year, we received 2,034 proposals for experiments on our instruments via peer reviewed access routes, requesting a total of 26,211 shifts. After peer review, 1,312 proposals were awarded beamtime. This resulted in 15,972 experimental shifts being awarded across 33 beamlines and eight electron microscopes. We welcomed 5,398 onsite user visits from academia across all instruments, with an additional 4,078 remote user visits. The machine continues to perform to the highest standard with 97% uptime and 98.4 hours mean time between failures (MTBF). Diamond continued its mission to engage and inspire the public through the promotion of science, producing 53 media features, 34 Science Highlights, 22 news pieces, and a fantastic video series, Leading Light, which shared the science stories of some those in our user community. The past year also saw the decision and funding announcement of the Diamond-II upgrade of themachine and instruments. This was the culmination of years of efforts for development of the scientific, technical and business cases by a large team from Diamond, working with the users of the facility and the Diamond committees. I want to recognise that this is an extraordinary effort that will ensure Diamond remains competitive at the international scale. This upgrade will bring a factor of 20 times improvement in emittance coupledwith an increase in electron beam energy from 3.0 to 3.5 GeV that will provide up to a factor of 70 improvement in brightness and coherence of Diamond’s photon beams at the higher energies. A new lattice geometry will allow us to not only keep and enhance all current beamlines but offers the opportunity for up to three flagship beamlines to emerge bringing us to a total of 36 beamlines. The new building to allow us to assemble the newmachine components started in earnest this January 2024 and is due to complete in 2025 creating 5,000 square metres of space. While we have had to make some changes to the scope of the upgrade between the outline and full business case, we are continuing to work closely with our funding agencies and various stakeholders to ensure that every step of the way we are innovating and delivering the best outcomes for both Diamond science, and the most value for money. This way we ensure we can