Background
Diamond is a UK National Facility that aims at providing researchers from the UK and the world with synchrotron-based techniques for a wide range of scientific applications.
The name DIAMOND was originally conceived by Mike Poole (the originator of the DIAMOND project) and stood as an acronym meaning DIpole And Multipole Output for the Nation at Daresbury. With the location of Diamond now being in Oxfordshire, the original meaning of the acronym was superseded by the current definition. This derives from that the fact that the light from the synchrotron is both 'hard' (referring to the "hard" X-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum) and bright, and hence the current name "Diamond" was born).
Diamond is located on the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory site, near to the ISIS neutron source, the Central Laser Facility, and the nearby laboratories at Harwell and Culham (including the Joint European Torus (JET) project). Diamond was originally due to replace the second-generation synchrotron at Daresbury in Cheshire, however, it was decided to locate the new British synchrotron in Oxfordshire.
The Diamond synchrotron is the largest UK-funded scientific facility to be built in the UK for over 45 years, since the Nimrod proton synchrotron which was sited at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. In 1977 financial approval was given to convert the Nimrod facility into the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) named ISIS.
There are ~ 70 dedicated synchrotron facilities in the world, and Diamond (3 GeV) is the world's largest medium energy synchrotron. Only four dedicated synchrotron facilities in the world are currently larger than Diamond, and all are high energy machines. These are: i) SPring-8 in Japan (8 GeV); ii) The ESRF in Grenoble, France (6.03 GeV); iii) The Advanced Photon Source (APS) in Chicago, USA (7 GeV); iv) DESY's PETRA III (6 GeV) in Germany, which is currently the world's largest dedicated synchrotron source.
Read more about this topic: Diamond Light Source
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