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Professor Justin Wark
Alvin Romansky Professor and the Distinguished Service Professor at Baylor College of Medicine Keynote Speaker at the 2016 Diamond Synchrotron Radiation User Meeting
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Professor Sir Adrian Smith
Chairman of the Board of Directors
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Diamond is an internationally leading synchrotron, providing powerful X-rays, infrared and ultraviolet light to enable world-class science at universities and in industry. However, the technology of synchrotrons and the science it enables moves at a breathtaking pace so we must be forward thinking, and continue to upgrade our facilities to provide the very best opportunities to our user community. This involves ensuring that every step in the delivery of science is second to none, from the machine at the centre of operations to the astonishingly large quantities of data needing to be processed and curated.
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In its tenth year of experiments, Diamond is now operating with 28 beamlines. The next two years will see the final five Phase III beamlines complete construction and welcome first users. Diamond is also operating eight electron microscopes; six high-resolution cryo-electron microscopes for the life sciences and two high-resolution electron microscopes for advanced materials research. The six cryo-electron microscopes are part of eBIC (electron Bio-Imaging Centre). Currently Titan Krios I and II are housed in the main synchrotron building. Titan Krios III, IV, Talos and Scios are situated at the Electron Microscopy and Hard X-ray Nanoprobe beamline (I14) facility, where Titan Krios III and IV will become operational in 2017. The two microscopes for materials research are supplied by Johnson Matthey and University of Oxford and operated under strategic collaboration agreements to provide for substantial dedicated peer reviewed user access. For academic research, the electron microscopes are free at the point of access through peer-review, similar to beamline admission. For proprietary research, access can be secured through Diamond’s industry team.
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The Diamond Spectroscopy village is formed of six beamlines, four of which are open for user operation and two are currently under commissioning and construction. Thanks to the complementarity of the different beamlines, the Spectroscopy Village supports a science programme that makes use of a very broad range of X-ray energies to perform experiments across diverse time and length scales.
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The Soft Condensed Matter (SCM) Village at Diamond Light Source provides scientific capabilities for the investigation of biological samples and inorganic systems using infrared (IR), ultraviolet (UV) and X-ray radiation. The SCM village consists of four beamlines divided into the two X-ray scattering beamlines (B21 and I22) and spectroscopy beamlines (B22 and B23).
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Materials such as seashells, teeth and bones often have remarkable physical properties that are far better than those of equivalent artificially produced substances. These biominerals contain brittle minerals and flexible polymers, and often show highly organised structures. Together, these features combine to give the correct level of strength and durability required for their applications.
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The five operational beamlines that constitute the Surfaces and Interfaces village include the Angle Resolved Photoelectron Spectroscopy (ARPES) beamline (I05), the Nanoscience beamline (I06), the Surface and Interface Diffraction beamline (I07), the Surface and Interface Structural Analysis beamline (I09) and the Beamline for Advanced Dichroism Experiments (I10). In addition, the Versatile Soft X-ray Scattering (VERSOX) beamline (B07) is in its final stages of construction, before user commissioning.
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The Materials Village beamlines provide a variety of experimental techniques for studying a diverse range of materials. The four village beamlines: Materials and Magnetism beamline (I16), Small-Molecule Single-Crystal Diffraction beamline (I19), Test beamline (B16) and the X-ray Imaging and Coherence beamline (I13) - with one branchline operated in collaboration with the University of Manchester - continue to produce exciting new science. In addition to actively supporting a diverse user programme, the village beamlines continue to develop new equipment and techniques to maintain their state-of-the-art.
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Academic and industrial researchers from around the globe use Diamond’s macromolecular crystallography (MX) beamlines to reveal and explore the three dimensional shape of large biological molecules. An intimate knowledge of shape and the arrangement of chemical properties in, for example, proteins, DNA and viruses, provides functional understanding of these important biological assemblies. This leads to better interpretation of the processes of life undertaken by cellular pathways and complex assemblies enabling discoveries spanning from fundamental biology through to MX becoming an integrated part of the drug discovery pipeline.
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ePSIC: electron Physical Science Imaging Centre
ePSIC (electron Physical Science Imaging Centre) is a new and world class facility based on the Diamond site. It is as a result of the collaboration between Johnson Matthey, Oxford University and Diamond Light Source. The centre is part of the Hard X-ray Nanoprobe beamline (I14) and the electron microscopy centre at Diamond, collectively providing unrivalled expertise and instruments. Dedicated to the physical sciences, ePSIC provides a 300 kV electron microscope, an energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) and electron energy loss (EELS) spectroscopy microscopes.
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eBIC: electron Bio-Imaging Centre
eBIC is a state-of-the-art facility at Diamond that allows scientists to explore complex biological systems in unprecedented detail via the use of six powerful cryo-electron microscopes (cryo-EM), exploiting the latest technology and software rarely available at home laboratories. Diamond was the first synchrotron facility to house and operate this type of microscope. It has set the trend with many facilities following suit.
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Membrane Protein Laboratory
Every year is an exciting one at the Membrane Protein Laboratory (MPL) with so many positive results and amazing collaborations. Over the past years, the MPL has become a well-established user facility providing a state-of-the-art pipeline from protein production to high throughput protein crystallisation for the membrane protein structure determination community. Its proximity to Diamond’s beamlines has greatly facilitated excellent working relations and collaborations between the beamline scientists, and both the MPL staff and users. Today, more than 18 membrane protein structures are as a result of the MPL and more than 30 publications acknowledge the use of the facility.
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XFEL Hub at Diamond
The XFEL Hub established at Diamond, is a centre for expertise in every aspect of XFEL experiments. Funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Biotechnology and Biological Research council (BBSRC), the UK-XFEL Hub provides support in technical development, including sample preparation, delivery systems and data analysis. The Hub actively supports the UK community in making full use of the transformational potential of all available XFELs in order to produce the best science.
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At the end of the 2015/16 Financial Year, there were 28 operational beamlines at Diamond. The remaining five beamlines to join are either in commissioning phases or under construction. By 2020, all Phase III beamlines will be operational with user experiments underway.
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In 2016/17, our 10th year of operations, a total of 191 days (4584 hours) were scheduled for beamline operations, 186 days of User Mode, and five beamline start-up days. This is less than in previous years because of the extended shutdown for the installation of the double-double bend achromat (DDBA) cell, described in more detail below. The majority of the beam delivery was in standard multibunch mode (900 bunch train) or ”hybrid” mode (686 bunch train + a single bunch) with total current of 300 mA. In addition there were two days in April 2016 of 'low-alpha' mode, to produce short bunches (3.5 ps rms). All beamline operations were carried out in top-up mode..
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The Optics and Metrology group continue to provide expert support to Diamond’s beamlines in the design, testing, and optimisation of beamline optics. We have also increased the technical capabilities of many existing and future beamlines by pursuing a broad range of optical research projects1-11. Analogous to using contact lenses to correct our eyesight, custom-designed refractive phase correctors were designed to compensate aberrations of non-perfect X-ray mirrors. These novel optics resulted in a ten times improvement in the performance of a prototype X-ray mirror. Ultra-high accuracy characterisation of state-of-the-art X-ray optics continues to be an essential procedure, both for quality control and the development of novel optics. Continuous improvements of metrology instrumentation and techniques has led to ever more accurate at-wavelength (using X-rays) and ex situ (using visible light) characterisation of X-ray optics and the motion stages used to position them.
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The ultimate goal of the Detector group at Diamond is to exploit the photons produced by the synchrotron to the full. A considerable amount of the Detector group’s work is therefore devoted to identifying which detector characteristics limit the present experiments, looking at new technologies to help improve the performance of the present experiments, and how they can possibly open up new experimental fields.
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Expectations of software have increased dramatically since Diamond started building beamlines. As we continue building our last phase of beamlines our attention is on more advanced automation. Automation software, through abstracting away and speeding up many experimental processes, is the key to increasing Diamond’s users’ productivity. Automation software can increase throughput by automating collections and sample handling and by aiding non-expert users, and in some cases running entirely unattended experiments. Software can help users run experiments that combine multiple techniques and to make sense of ever larger volumes of data. It can also streamline the collection process by integrating it with the processes that occur before and after data collection. Without an advanced level of automation many of the beamlines and end stations we are currently working on would not be worth building..
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The Data Analysis and Scientific Software Group is embedded within Diamond’s science, software and computing groups along with the wider scientific and industrial communities to help maximise the impact and information derived from the challenging experiments carried out at the facility. The trend of experiments towards intuitive, automated, high data volume or computationally intensive analysis has led the group and our collaborators to develop a suite of open source software tools that are also finding uses in the wider scientific community..
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In our tenth year of operations (April 2016 to end of March 2017), we received 1,554 proposals for experiments on beamlines and electron microscopes, which requested a total of 16,557 shifts. After peer-review, 922 proposals were awarded beamtime. This resulted in 8,866 experimental shifts being awarded, spread across 28 beamlines and two electron microscopes. We welcomed 4,587 user visits from academia across all facilities (beamlines and electron microscopes), with an additional 3,486 remote user visits.
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The UK Catalysis Hub
Catalysis is a core area of contemporary science, engineering and technology that has substantial economic and societal impact. Although rooted in chemistry and chemical engineering, catalytic science is now largely multidisciplinary, drawing strongly from materials and bio-sciences. The Hub is a national network with over 35 collaborating universities. It was established in 2013 with funding from EPSRC to coordinate, promote and advance the UK catalysis research portfolio. Its physical centre is located next door to Diamond at the Research Complex at Harwell (RCaH). The project has five themes each directed by a lead investigator from five partner universities:
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Diamond Manchester Collaboration
The collaboration between the University of Manchester and Diamond Light Source was established to construct and operate an imaging facility at Diamond’s X-ray Imaging and Coherence beamline (I13). Complementary to the Coherence branchline (I13-1), the Diamond Manchester Imaging branchline (I13-2) performs real space imaging and tomography on a length or timescale not achievable in home laboratories. Thanks to the high flux from Diamond, images of high signal-to-noise ratios can be recorded very quickly on I13-2. This enables the study of dynamic processes such as electrochemical deposition for explaining battery failure, bubble dynamics in molten metals for understanding how metals solidify and therefore fail, and the dynamics of the closed cochlea, the part of the ear that converts sound waves to electrical signals.
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Industrial engagement plays a pivotal role at Diamond Light Source and there is ever increasing value placed by companies on the services that Diamond has to offer. In June 2016, we reached a milestone of our 100th client and now have well in excess of 100 companies carrying out proprietary projects across 25 beamlines, integrated facilities and laboratories; the breadth and depth of the industrial engagement with Diamond grows increasingly strong.
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Throughout 2016-2017, Diamond continued its commitment to engage diverse audiences with our science and technology, and to build skills across a wide range of areas with our staff, users and members of the community. We achieve this through a programme of regular, high quality schools and public events, the delivery of a range of events and workshops which meet the needs of our scientific community.
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Diamond Light Source Ltd was established in 2002 as a joint venture limited company funded by the UK Government via the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and by the Wellcome Trust, owning 86% and 14% of the shares respectively. Diamond now employs over 620 scientists, engineers, technicians and support staff from over 40 countries worldwide. The Chief Executive and Directors are advised by committees representing key stakeholder groups, including the Science Advisory Committee (SAC), Diamond User Committee (DUC), and Diamond Industrial Science Committee (DISCo).
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The Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) advises the CEO and the Science Directors on the scientific and technical questions impacting the specification, design, commissioning and operation; experimental and user support facilities, and opportunities for scientific exploitation.
The Diamond Industrial Science Committee (DISCo) advises the CEO and Directors on opportunities for industry to be engaged in research at Diamond, industrial research priorities that will help shape operational strategy, including the best way to exploit the current suite of beamlines and to develop the case for investment in future beamlines, and to develop best practice for industrial engagement.
The Diamond User Committee (DUC) has been set as a platform for discussion between Diamond and the user community of matters relating to the operation and strategy of Diamond.
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Diamond Light Source is the UK's national synchrotron science facility, located at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.
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