ALICE IS WONDER LAND OF FUTURE.

Byline: by NEIL HODGSON Industry Reporter

SCIENTISTS at Daresbury have made a breakthrough in accelerator physics that will attract new business to the area and help medical research.

The Daresbury Science & Innovation Campus is developing the fourth generation light source, a system that smashes particles together at high speed to examine their structure.

Daresbury examined particles in the foot and mouth virus to help understand its structure and the technology can also be used in understanding types of cancer.

Cern, in Switzerland, became famous this year when the vast underground track using third generation light source technology was commissioned.

Daresbury is recognised as a world hub for developing the fourth generation light source and earlier this month it celebrated two milestones.

Alice - Accelerators and Lasers In Combined Experiments - aims to develop new accelerators at a fraction of the energy needed for conventional systems.

The Daresbury team succeeded in sending electrons round its underground track at 99.9% the speed of light.

Alice is also the first accelerator in Europe to use an energy recovery process which captures and re-uses the initial beam energy after each circuit rather than discarding it.

Dr Susan Smith, head of the accelerator physics group at the laboratory, said: "Energy recovery means a massive saving of power.

"The Alice team have been working tremendously hard to demonstrate energy recovery and when we did this it felt like Christmas had come early."

She added: "Once fully commissioned Alice will accelerate to 35 million volts, electrons will be sent round the accelerator at 99.99% of the speed of light and 99.9% of the power at the final accelerator stage will be recovered, making the power sources for the acceleration drastically smaller and cheaper and economically viable."