Diamond Light Source: status and perspectives

Abstract

Diamond Light Source, a third-generation synchrotron radiation (SR) facility in the UK, celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2012. A private limited company was set up in April 2002 to plan, construct and operate the new user-oriented SR facility, called in brief Diamond. It succeeded the Synchrotron Radiation Source in Daresbury, a second-generation synchrotron that opened in 1980 as the world's first dedicated X-ray-providing facility, closing finally in 2008, by which time Diamond's accelerators and first beamlines were operating and user experiments were under way. This theme issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A gives some examples of the rich diversity of research done in the initial five years, with some glimpses of activity up to 2014. Speakers at the 10 year anniversary symposium were drawn from a small number of major thematic areas and each theme was elaborated by a few speakers whose contributions were placed into a broader context by a leading member of the UK academic community in the role of rapporteur. This introduction gives a summary of the design choices and strategic planning of Diamond as a coherent user facility, a snapshot of its present status and some consideration of future perspectives.

Development of tools to automate quantitative analysis of radiation damage in SAXS experiments

“…The surge in popularity of the technique is a result of recent improvements in both software and hardware, allowing for high-throughput data collection and analysis (Bizien et al, 2016;Graewert & Svergun, 2013). This is reflected in the increasing number of dedicated SAXS beamlines such as BM29 at the ESRF, P12 at the EMBL Hamburg and B21 at Diamond Light Source (Blanchet et al, 2015;Brennich et al, 2016;Materlik et al, 2015;Pernot et al, 2013).…”

VMXi: a fully automated, fully remote, high-flux in situ macromolecular crystallography beamline

“…In situ crystallography is possible using a laboratory-based X-ray source (PlateMate, Rigaku) (Hargreaves, 2012), but is now also offered routinely at a number of synchrotron facilities around the world, including the DLS beamlines I03 and I24 (Aller et al, 2015;Axford et al, 2012;Materlik et al, 2015;Allan et al, 2015), the SLS beamline X06DA (PXIII) (Bingel-Erlenmeyer et al, 2011), the ESRF beamlines BM30 and BM14 (le Maire et al, 2011), the APS beamline GM/CA (Broecker et al, 2016) and the PETRA beamline P14 (DESY, Hamburg, Germany).…”

Online data analysis at the ESRF bioSAXS beamline, BM29

“…The popularity of using small-angle X-ray scattering on proteins and nucleic acids in solution (bioSAXS) to resolve their three-dimensional shape is continuously growing (Graewert & Svergun, 2013;Hura et al, 2009;Reyes et al, 2014). This has not only resulted in the construction of new dedicated synchrotron beamlines, such as BM29 at the ESRF, P12 at the EMBL Hamburg and B21 at the Diamond Light Source (Pernot et al, 2013;Blanchet et al, 2015;Materlik et al, 2015), but also pushed forward new developments in both beamline instrumentation and sample handling. Examples for this trend are the development of dedicated sample changers (Round et al, 2008(Round et al, , 2015Hura et al, 2009;Nielsen et al, 2012;Martel et al, 2012) and the integration of size-exclusion chromatography systems into existing beamlines to ensure the monodispersity of the sample at a given time (Mathew et al, 2004;David & Pé rez, 2009;Round et al, 2013;Graewert et al, 2015).…”