Diamond Synchrotron

Final Stretch

Posted on 24 June 2013 by Pete

This is Ashley here with a final report before the end of this visit. Looking back over the last five days here it’s hard to believe how much data we’ve acquired. We certainly have stormed through data acquisition. In part due to not encountering another four and a half hour “stored beam has been lost”
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The Monks of Diamond House

Posted on 23 June 2013 by Pete

72 Hours into beam time and you realize that it has stopped feeling strange that you have just got-up at 6pm in the afternoon and that the first thing that you do is to walk the 200 meters from the hotel (Ridgeway house) to see if the experiment is still flying. It is hard to
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Cooling the ‘excited state’

Posted on 22 June 2013 by Pete

Well I find myself, borrowing a few minutes to write the blog before going to bed at 10am on a Saturday morning….would be height of totally decadence if I hadn’t been hold-up in a room the size of a storage container for the last 17 hours !! It’s not as bad as it sounds, yesterday
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Seeing the Light for the First Time

Posted on 21 June 2013 by Pete

“Stored beam has been lost.” If you have ever been a User at the Diamond synchrotron you will probably be irritatingly used to these words. These words are quite likely a sign that the experiment you have spent a lot of time and effort preparing for has been cut short due to a problem with
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Seeing the Light

Posted on 21 June 2013 by Pete

So to business…..what is like to be here and what makes us so excited. A serious point to start, even an instrument as sophisticated and expensive as the Diamond Synchrotron provides information which is only as good as the samples with which it is feed….you know the expression ‘rubbish in rubbish out’…so we go to
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Diamond Light on the Longest Day

Posted on 21 June 2013 by Pete

So as you will see from our first few lines it has taken me and John a little bit longer to get to writing our blog than we anticipated. As with the best laid plans of ‘mice and men’ things never run to plan, and when you’re running on a beamline that costs ~£1K per
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Diamond 24 hours in and nearly no sleep

Posted on 19 June 2013 by Pete

Nearly 24 hours from ‘Tulsa’….well it feels like that when you’ve had 3.5 hours sleep since 5.30 yesterday morning when we started out from Cardiff and you are struggling with half a dozen computers and your brain is working nearly as fast as the liquid nitrogen frozen slug that we are examining !!! Oh….yes and
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