Word: synchrotron
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...large, circular building at 800 Blackburn Road, Clayton, for just another office complex. But inside, something spectacular is being produced - light a million times brighter than the sun, light to which scientists from around the country are now drawn like moths. They're queuing to use the Australian Synchrotron, the largest such device in the Southern Hemisphere and one of about 40 worldwide. Researchers hope it will provide discoveries and answers across almost every field of science - whether it's seeing how insects breathe, designing new drugs, cleaning up contaminated soil or beating dementia. "It lets us probe matter right...
...Opened in July, the machine is an enormous, $A220 million microscope, built by the Victorian government with funding from research bodies and governments in Australia and New Zealand. It's capable of peering inside atoms, yet at first glance the synchrotron appears to be little more than a white-walled, ring-shaped tunnel. In the era of ever-shrinking gadgets, this machine stands out - 67 m in diameter, it's roughly the size of a football field. Yet it's so sensitive that the temperature inside the building that houses it must be kept within a degree either side...
...million laps a second - almost the speed of light. It's when they are forced by the magnets to bend and change direction that the streams of subatomic particles - which travel the equivalent of 50 times to the sun and back each day - emit electromagnetic radiation, the precious synchrotron light. Selected into different wavelengths that are channeled down tubes called beam lines to laboratories set around the machine, that light will be used by researchers to examine processes and minute samples with a precision and at speeds unheard of in everyday labs...
...could solve that problem by etching off only a tiny slice of a sample with a needlelike light beam and cooking it in a plasma furnace equipped with a mass spectrometer especially sensitive to trace elements. Similarly, researchers at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have shown that a synchrotron radiation device can bounce a beam of infrared energy off a piece of evidence and analyze the spectrum of its reflection without damaging the sample. Researchers are also trying to use infrared hardware to analyze the composition of the oils in fingerprints, which would allow suspects to be identified...
...ozone- destroying gases and films of sparkling diamonds. In Hong Kong engineers are fabricating computer chips in clean rooms that rival the very best facilities at U.S. universities. In Pohang, South Korea, scientists will soon start probing the structure of materials with a $180 million tool known as a synchrotron light source -- one of only half a dozen such machines in the world...