Synchrotron Radiation Source

[1][2][3] The research facility provided synchrotron radiation to a large number of experimental stations[4] and had an operating cost of approximately £20 million per annum.

The first storage ring design was a 2 GeV FODO lattice consisting of alternating focussing and defocussing quadrupoles, with one dipole following every quadrupole (i.e. two dipoles per repeating cell), giving a natural beam emittance of around 1000 nm-rad with 16 cells.

In the original design, the typical initial circulating current was around 300mA but after the HBL upgrade it was decreased to around 220mA.

Below is a list of the experimental stations and their purposes; The SRS supported a broad range of science, including pioneering work on X-ray diffraction, structural molecular biology, surface physics and chemistry, materials science and upper atmosphere physics.

[3] Two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry have been received by scientists who performed part of their prize-winning research using the SRS: Sir John E. Walker in 1997 for his contribution to the understanding of the synthesis of ATP[14] (Adenosine Triphosphate), a key component of the body’s energy transport, and Sir Venki Ramakrishnan for his work on the structure and function of the ribosome,[15] the molecular machine that constructs proteins from ‘instructions’ coded in mRNA.