Iran has begun work on the most important science project within the country’s history: a circular accelerator referred to as a synchrotron.
The device are going to be built on a 50ha site near Imam Khomeini International University (IKIU) within the city of Qazvin, about 150km northwest of Tehran.
The project was launched yesterday at a ceremony attended by Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the nuclear energy Organization of Iran, and Sorena Sattari, the government’s vice chairman for science and technology.
Synchrotrons accelerate electrons to high energy then make them generate flashes of x-rays as they travel around a circular ring. These are then sent down “beamlines”, to be utilized in a variety of experiments within the fields of physics, nanotechnology, electronics, radiotherapy, pharmacology, industry, biology, environment and archaeology, among others.
The project has been in preparation for a decade. Work on a conceptual design for the “Iranian light Facility”, because the synchrotron is named , was begun in June 2010. This envisaged an electron container with a circumference of 528m and an energy of three gigaelectron volts (GeV), putting it within the mid-range of electron accelerators, and bigger than the sole other synchrotron within the Middle East , 2GeV Sesame ring in Jordan.
No cost has been given for the scheme, but the similar Sesame project came in at around $90m.
Iranian press agency PressTV notes that about 200 scientists and researchers from Iran and abroad are contributing to the plan.