{"id":272948,"date":"2019-01-17T16:49:02","date_gmt":"2019-01-17T18:49:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=272948"},"modified":"2020-02-05T18:28:40","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T21:28:40","slug":"leaping-towards-brilliance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/leaping-towards-brilliance\/","title":{"rendered":"Leaping towards brilliance"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was almost six o\u2019clock in the early evening of Thursday, May 17, when electrical engineer Sergio Marques took the opportunity to stretch his legs and look for more energy in yet another cup of coffee. Then he would resume taking the measurements his team had been working on since the beginning of the week, together with Brazilian physicist Liu Lin’s research group, sometimes for 24 hours at a stretch. Marques and Lin, researchers at the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS) in Campinas, in central S\u00e3o Paulo State, had been testing the components of a linear electron accelerator purchased for US$6 million from the Institute of Applied Physics in Shanghai, China. Installed during the previous weeks in a 32-meter tunnel with concrete walls, every half second the device propels microscopic packets of trillions of the negatively charged particles at close to the speed of light. It will feed the largest, most complex and versatile research instrument ever built in the country: Sirius, a state-of-the-art source of synchrotron radiation, which is a special type of light that allows researchers to investigate the structure of matter at the scale of atoms and molecules.<\/p>\n

Read:<\/strong>
\nThe race for the best light<\/a><\/div>\n

Sirius has been under construction since 2014 at the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM), 15 kilometers from Campinas. It should be ready for an initial test by the end of this year, if the requested funds approved by the federal government months ago are released soon. The new synchrotron light source is a particle accelerator composed of three parts. It’s installed in a 68,000 square-foot building that must remain as isolated as possible from temperature changes and external vibrations, especially those generated by the truck traffic on the highway connecting Campinas to Mogi-Mirim which passes two kilometers away.<\/p>\n

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L\u00e9o Ramos Chaves<\/span><\/a> Detail of an inverter, a series of magnets that makes the electrons snake inside the storage ring and release energy in the form of synchrotron lightL\u00e9o Ramos Chaves<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Designed by the LNLS teams, Sirius will replace the UVX, the first source of synchrotron light in the southern hemisphere. Built in the 1990s, today the UVX is no longer competitive. About 90% of Sirius’s components were developed at the LNLS workshops, or designed there and produced by Brazilian high-tech companies. The linear accelerator is an exception. “Due to time concerns, we commissioned a machine with high-level specifications from researchers who had completed a third-generation synchrotron light source in Shanghai, one generation prior to Sirius, and they provided us data on almost every part of the accelerator,” Marques explains. He began working at the UVX in 1997 at the age of 16, and now leads the LNLS diagnostic group, which monitors the electron beam and the quality of the synchrotron light that arrives at its experimental stations.<\/p>\n

When it goes into full operation Sirius will be\u2014for a limited time\u2014the most advanced source of synchrotron light in the world, in addition to being the brightest X-ray spectrum source in its energy class (see article<\/a>).<\/em> Put simply, this means that the accelerator will allow researchers to extract very concentrated beams of light from electron streams traveling at almost 300,000 kilometers per second, beams that can penetrate deep into even dense materials such as rock, and which will produce clear images of objects only a few nanometers (millionths of a millimeter) apart. Their intense brightness will reduce the time for acquiring images from samples from hours to seconds, which is crucial in the study of biological materials, which degrade rapidly. The reduction in the time needed to produce each image will allow a greater number to be obtained per second, and enable scientists to reconstruct the movement of very fast phenomena at the level of atoms and molecules, such as interactions between two compounds, or the movement of ions in charging and discharging batteries.<\/p>\n<\/a>