Synchrotron interest pulls in would-be users

A Melbourne workshop organised by the Australian Synchrotron Project last week attracted 350 participants, including representatives from synchrotrons all over the world.

The Australian Synchrotron Workshop, which was held at the University of Melbourne, provided attendees with an update on the new design of the facility, and an opportunity to participate in discussions about potential beamlines.

Opening the conference, Victorian Minister for Innovation John Brumby announced that the synchrotron would be twice as powerful as originally proposed.

The new design, known as Boomerang 20, would not impact on the planned completion date for the facility, which is expected to be up and running in March 2007.

Construction of the new facility will commence in the middle of this year, with commissioning and testing of the machine expected to begin at the end of 2005, project director Garry Seaborne told workshop participants.

Brumby said new funding arrangements for the synchrotron had been adopted to accommodate the new design and boost investor confidence. The government will now provide $AUD157.2 million for the building and the machine, while a further $AUD49.1 million required for setting up the beamlines would be funded by consortia consisting of universities and research institutions, other governments and the private sector.

The University of Melbourne has already come on board with a commitment to financial and in-kind support for the project. Vice-Chancellor Alan Gilbert said the university would support the cost and development of one or more beamlines, although the details of the commitment are still being worked out.

The synchrotron's storage ring will now be 216 metres in circumference, and will have a capacity of 30 beamlines instead of 24, generating light twice as bright as the original design. It is estimated that it will meet 95 per cent of the needs of Australian scientists.

Its new design also puts it into a world leading position as an intermediate energy synchrotron radiation source, technical director Alan Jackson said: "The Australian synchrotron will be a world-class facility that will enable forefront exploration over a broad range of scientific disciplines."

'Good scientific case'

"The breadth and depth of science at the meeting was really impressive for this stage in the development of the synchrotron. The new design is excellent, and most of the proposed beamlines have a very good scientific case," said Prof Michael Bancroft, research director at the Canadian Light Source, and an invited speaker at the conference.

CSIRO structural biologist Jose Varghese, a member of the National Scientific Advisory Committee for the Australian Synchrotron project, said he found the workshop very useful.

"A staggering number of people turned up. Obviously a lot of scientists are interested in the synchrotron," he said.

Varghese said that the project was a credit to the Victorian government's vision for science and technology.

Varghese led one of the breakout sessions on beamlines, as a champion of beamlines to be used for protein crystallography. He is proposing that two beamlines be installed -- a high-accuracy MAD beamline for high-throughput routine crystallography experiments, and a micro-focus beamline for very small or weakly diffracting crystals.

He said that the group of 50 or so protein crystallographers in Australia right now would probably expand to 100 by the time the synchrotron was operational, and the process would become routine for the analysis of proteins and rational drug design.

Proceedings of the workshop will be available from the Australian Synchrotron Project later this month or early next month, and a summary will soon be available on the project's website.