Free tours of the UK’s Synchrotron particle accelerator

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Update: 13th October.

Seems that all the available tickets went to the mailing list subscribers before any could be offered to the public.

There will be another open day in March 2011, and the best (only?) way to get a ticket to that tour will be to sign up to their mailing list, which you can do here.

Sorry about that.

Get excited – the Diamond Light Source – the formal brandname for the UK’s synchrotron facility is offering free tours next month of their sprawling base in South Oxfordshire (map).

This is BIG SCIENCE for the fanboys (and fangirls!).

The synchrotron is basically a particle accelerator which then produce very bright beams of light which scientists use to study a wide range of material properties, structures and chemical reactions.

The UK’s Diamond’s storage ring (the main part of the accelerator) is 561 m in circumference – which explains the rather distinctive building in the photo below.

The two dates for the tours are 13th Nov 2010 and 8th Jan 2011.

If you are on their mailing list, you will be able to book a ticket today – but the rest will have to wait until Wednesday before bookings open.

Obviously, I’m on the mailing list – so have booked a slot for 11am on the November tour. Maybe will see some of you there as well.

I can’t link directly to the booking page yet as I don’t know what the public URL will be, but will try to update this blog post on Wednesday morning as soon as I see the page go live.

The facility itself is not that far from Culham, home to the UK’s fusion research centre which also offers free tours a few times per year.

NEWSLETTER

Tagged with: particle accelerator, Synchrotron

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3 comments

annmucc says:

11 October 2010 at 5:07 pm

I was on the mailing list and got tickets for the January visit :D.
Yeay! Can’t wait 🙂
Sara Fletcher says:

13 October 2010 at 3:49 pm

Sorry to say, but demand for this has been so high we have filled all the places without opening the event to the wider public!

The programme of visits will continue in 2011, so to register an interest in future events please visit the Diamond website:
http://www.diamond.ac.uk/Home/Events/InsideDiamond.html
Beanie says:

14 October 2010 at 1:46 pm

It’s a shame as I did a tour of the JET reactor a few years back so would have enjoyed this.

Perhaps as a public funded facility these tours should be more accessible to the public and be offered a bit more frequently.

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Visit to Diamond Light Source « My Path Through Research says:

10 January 2011 at 9:09 pm

[…] accelerator – open their doors to the public to go to visit. I had learnt about this through IanVisits‘ blog some months back, dutifully signed up to the mailing list, and when the e-mail arrived […]