Magnetic

Today I got a tour of the Advanced Light Source, the synchrotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. The synchrotron is a light source that produces some of the world's brightest ultraviolet and X-ray beams. How bright? About a billion times brighter than the sun. Today the ALS was down for maintenance, so I was able to get inside the storage ring. Were the ALS operating, nobody would be in here - with 1.9 billion electron volts worth of particles circling the ring, it's not a terribly hospitable place.

What you see in the photo are magnets, magnets, and more magnets. Magnets with names like wigglers, undulators, superbends, and sextupoles accelerate the beam, shape it, and bend it.

What we're looking at here are three different beampipes. The rightmost one injects the beam into the storage ring. The gold-colored boxes immediately to the left enclose the storage ring beampipe itself (they merge in the large silver box). At the left, the vertical cylinders are shutters that control the passage of light into a beamline that exits the storage ring through the shielding blocks to go to an experiment station.