Gerhard Materlik has been tapped as the first head of DIAMOND, a third-generation synchrotron light source near Oxford, England, and the largest scientific facility to be built in the UK in more than three decades (see Physics Today, January 2000, page 50). “It’s a really exciting opportunity to do something new,” says Materlik, who will take up the post on 15 October, moving from the German Electron Synchrotron facility (DESY) in Hamburg, where he has been the associate director of HASYLAB and coordinator of the lab’s x-ray free-electron laser project.
A joint project of the UK and French governments and the Wellcome Trust, the world’s richest biomedical foundation, DIAMOND will come with a price tag of £195 million ($278 million) and a 3-GeV electron storage ring, providing soft and hard x rays from 5 eV to 200 keV. The synchrotron is scheduled to come on line in 2006....
