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Two million hours of science

Nature Materials volume 7, pages 827–830 (2008)Cite this article

After over a quarter of a century, the doors of the world's first synchrotron radiation source have closed. Its contribution to materials science in the past and the future should not be underestimated.

The first paper2 from the SRS appeared in 1981; it concerned metal structures obtained from synchrotron radiation and included predictions for nanocrystals. It appeared at a time when the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven in the United States was nearing completion, and the Photon Factory in Tsukuba, Japan, was at a similar stage. The escalation of synchrotron radiation science that followed can be judged from the spate of purpose-built storage rings constructed around the world, now numbering over 60. The appetite for new synchrotrons has been fed in part by the development of multi-source multipole magnets located in the straight sections between the single-source bending magnets that deflect the particle beam into a closed path (Fig. 1). Known as 'insertion devices', these multipole magnets were shoe-horned into the early machines, and the SRS had one of the first3. Storage rings designed a decade later incorporated these magnets throughout the ring and established the next generation of machines. These include three huge synchrotron sources: the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, the Advanced Photon Source in Chicago, USA, and SPring-8 in Nishi-Harima, Japan. These were the first of the so-called third-generation sources, the latest of which is the Diamond Light Source near Oxford, which opened in January 2007 and replaces the SRS as the United Kingdom's synchrotron radiation facility. Where a modest trillion photons in 1980 could be delivered each second onto a square millimetre in a 0.1% band pass from a single-source bending magnet, the brilliance in X-ray beams from multipole magnets has increased by more than nine orders of magnitude for modern machines.

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Figure 1: The Synchrotron Radiation Source at Daresbury Laboratory.

STFC

Figure 2: Atomic structures of complex materials.
Figure 3: XMCD studies of magnetic materials.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Mathematics and Physics, and Centre for Advanced Functional Materials and Devices, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, SY23 3BZ, UK

    G. N. Greaves

  2. Department of Chemistry, 20 Gordon Street, University College London, London, WC1H 0AJ, UK

    C. R. A. Catlow

  3. STFC Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus, Warrington, WA4 4AD, Cheshire, UK

    G. E. Derbyshire

  4. SUPA, School of Physics and Astronomy, and Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions, The University of Edinburgh, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK

    M. I. McMahon & R. J. Nelmes

  5. Diamond Light Source, Didcot, OX11 0DE, Oxfordshire, UK

    G. van der Laan

Authors
  1. G. N. Greaves
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Correspondence to G. N. Greaves.

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Greaves, G., Catlow, C., Derbyshire, G. et al. Two million hours of science. Nature Mater 7, 827–830 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2305

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