UK Scientists Eye Half Mile-Long Microscope

[Redfield]

UK Scientists Eye Half Mile-Long Microscope
Fri Jul 11, 7:25 AM ET
By Pete Harrison

LONDON (Reuters) - British scientists are lobbying to build the world's most powerful microscope, an instrument so advanced that it can see individual atoms moving.

The European Spallation Source (ESS) -- a type of instrument known as a matterscope -- would allow them to look at the growth of protein molecules in living human tissue or at the stresses deep within the wheel of a train or the wing of an aircraft.

"This is on par with the Hubble telescope, but it's for looking at inner space," said Professor Bob Cywinski of Leeds University, which is backing the one billion pound project.

A disused World War II airfield in North Yorkshire has been earmarked for the matterscope's 0.62 mile-long concrete tunnel and neutron research laboratories.

"To look at it, you'd just see a mound of grass growing over the top and sheep wandering around," said Cywinski.

Rather than using light to look at microscopic structures, matterscopes use neutrons -- bouncing them off the surface just as bats or dolphins use sound waves to create the image of an object.

The neutrons are created by using powerful magnets to propel protons down the concrete tunnel at nearly the speed of light. At the end, they hit a metal target, chipping off neutrons, which can be focused into a beam.

Meetings with Science Minister Lord Sainsbury this month have shifted the proposal up a level, said Cywinski, and it now looked like a real possibility. "We've cleared the first hurdle," he told Reuters.

Britain already has the world's most powerful matterscope, of 200 kilowatts, at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory in Oxfordshire, he said, but the United States and Japan are about to eclipse it.

It will be dwarfed by a 1.5 megawatt Spallation Neutron Source in Tennessee, and by Japan's one megawatt J-Parc, both of which should be ready around 2006.

"The Americans are going to leapfrog Rutherford Appleton using a European design," said Martin Doxey of the White Rose consortium, which links the universities of Sheffield, Leeds and York to the project.

"What this is about is taking a more modern European design to leapfrog them," he added. "It's not a macho thing. It's not a 'mine is bigger than yours' thing. To do the next generation of experiments, we simply need the bigger beam."

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I've never seen print outs from these machines, but I'm especially curious now that there are 3 HUGE ones.