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News Release Communique

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Key Synchrotron Commissioning Milestone Achieved

The "booster ring", a major operations component of the Canadian Light Source at the University of Saskatchewan, has been successfully commissioned, exceeding expectations for both efficiency and reliability.

"We've reached all our design goals for the booster ring, all the components are working properly, and we're ready to deliver electrons to the storage ring," said accelerator physicist Les Dallin who designed both the booster and storage rings for the $174-million project.

"We're very confident we will have the synchrotron ready to go for January of 2004."

This milestone marks the successful completion of the second of three phases of testing required by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.

The booster ring ramps up the energy of speeding electrons in preparation for transfer to the storage ring where brilliant synchrotron light is produced for a wide range of scientific experiments. Magnetic fields in the booster force the electrons to race in a circle and powerful radio waves boost the energy of the electron beam.

On Sunday, the booster ring was continuously operated for 6.5 hours, much longer than the couple of minutes at a time that will be required when the synchrotron is fully operational.

As well, the design goals for energy (2.9 billion electron volts) and current (20 milli-amps) were fully met, and the electron beam was so well aligned that magnets for correcting the beam's orbit did not have to be used, though they will be used in future to refine the alignment.

"The successful building and testing of the booster ring has been accomplished in only 200 hours of intensive work which is a credit to the efforts of all CLS staff, especially the commissioning team of accelerator physicists and engineers, the computer staff writing the control systems, and the mechanical and electrical technicians," said Mark de Jong, Interim Executive-Director of the Canadian Light Source Inc. (CLSI).

The next major step will be to inject and store the electron beam in the storage ring, a milestone expected to be achieved in early 2003.

The U of S-owned national facility is one of the largest scientific projects in Canada and one of the most advanced synchrotrons in the world.

Synchrotron light -- millions of times brighter than sunlight -- is used to view chemical reactions and the micro-structure of materials, paving the way for new drugs, more powerful computer chips, better engine lubricants, more effective medical imaging and a host of other applications for science and industry.

CLS funding partners include the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canadian government (including Western Economic Diversification, Natural Resources Canada, the National Research Council, NSERC, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research), Saskatchewan Industry and Resources, Ontario Innovation Trust, Alberta Innovation and Science, Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research, U of S, the City of Saskatoon, SaskPower, and Boehringer Ingelheim, University of Western Ontario, and University of Alberta. GlaxoSmithKline has also provided funding for a U of S chair in an area of synchrotron science.

For more information on the CLS, visit: www.lightsource.ca

For more information, contact:

Kathryn Warden
U of S/CLS Research Communications
Tel: (306) 966-2506
kathryn.warden@usask.ca

Last modified: 2008-07-29 14:07:32