Today: a rare live blog!
This post is brought to you live from the Diamond control room, where one of our beamlines, I04-1 is preparing ro receive first beam.
When Diamond was built, the decision was made to build the beamlines in a phased construction programme, so we started with seven beamlines and are building more at the rate of about four a year. We currently have 13 operating in various stages of optimisation, and another 9 under construction. I04-1 is one of these, scheduled for operation in October 2009.
So today the beamline should be receiving X-rays into the front end, the very first stage of the beamline. It’s a bit unusual in that I04-1 is a side-station, so it shares part of it’s beam pipe with another beamline, which makes the whole thing a bit more complicated. Right now we are gathered in the control room, waiting for the machine to get up and running…
11:58 Health Physics are ready to go. Everyone in the control room is looking very intently at big screens. The control room monitors several hundred thousand components and nearly half a million parameters.
12:08 It’s a good reminder of what a team effort these things are. The beamline scientists are here, the diagnostics team who monitor the beam, the ID team, who look after the undulator that generates the very bright synchrotron light and accelerator physics are all gathered round. Health physics are communicating with the control room by walkie talkie, which seems a strangely outdated technology here… It’s also a reminder to me that whilst I have a good overview of how the machine works there is a huge amount that I don’t know.
12:11 and that’s it! The undulator narrows to the required gap, the beam enters and hits the slits before the monochromator, the first optical component. It is one small step, there is still a lot more to be done, but that’s how it is here. Next stage is taking beam into the optics hutch itself to test those components but that must wait for another day.
\o/
Just so everyone is clear… you should perhaps point out that ID stands for ‘insertion device’ – though I imagine a supreme amount of intelligent design went into its construction!
I do like the idea that we have an intelligent design team, they are gods!
I don’t understand half of this (vague memories of undergrad) but it still sounds exciting!
And I have been in a situation where I wanted to talked about some very clever architecture, and got really close to saying something was “intelligently designed”.
Same as Eva.
It does sound very impressive though – and I like the idea of a live blog.
It is quite exciting to watch (although less for our technicians, who have been through the process many times!). I think it’s easy to think that once the main 561m particle acclerator started up in January 2007 Diamond has moved into routine operations, but in fact there are advances taking place all the time. Each beamline is different as well, so each time a beamline comes onstream new research opportunties open up. The beamline could have a more tightly focussed beam, more intense X-rays, better coherence properties or improved detectors, sometimes it’s a facility not offered anywhere else in the world.
It’s a really interesting project to be part of!