On Wednesday, the Lower Sixth Physicists had wonderful opportunity to visit the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford, to get a tour of the Diamond Light Source, which is the UK’s national synchrotron facility.
writes S Shah (L6th):
During this we learnt about how the synchrotron accelerates electrons to speeds near the speed of light, so that they give off light 10 billion times brighter that the sun. The synchrotron is structured like a circle (technically a 48-sided polygon) and it has 32 beamlines where monochromatic light is collected in the optics room before being used to analyse samples that scientists want to investigate. We got the opportunity to have a chat with a team that was working in one of the beamlines and they talked to us about how the Diamond Light Source has helped to digitally unroll Herculean Scrolls that would be too fragile to unroll by hand, improve the efficiency of plastic-eating bacteria and many more examples.
All of us who visited the facility, were in awe of this amazing use of technology (especially the quadrupole magnets that help focus the electron beam) to help contribute to many fields in science.
Thank you to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory for having us and the Physics Department for making this possible!
