Making room for LigHt
Big things are underway at the Tandem Laboratory where the accelerator hall was recently reconstructed to accommodate the new light-element characterisation platform (LigHt).
This block weighs 1000 kg and needs to be put in its new place with a forklift operated by senior research engineer Johan Oscarsson. Photo: Bart Royeaerd
LigHt is a new experimental platform for materials science that recently received 32.5 million SEK in funding from the Wallenberg Initiative Materials Science for Sustainability (WISE). The project is led by the divisions for Materials Physics and Condensed Matter Physics of Energy Materials as well as the Tandem Laboratory, and will combine multiple cutting-edge techniques to accelerate materials design for green energy applications.
What will make LigHt unique is that materials can be fabricated, modified and comprehensively analysed in-situ and under dynamic conditions. All instruments will be connected to each other in one facility so that samples can be transferred from one instrument to the next within the same vacuum system allowing for precise control of sample conditions at all times. To this end, instruments for Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS), Extended pressure hard X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (EP-HAXPES) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) will be integrated into the existing infrastructure linked to the 5 MV Pelletron accelerator at the Tandem Laboratory. It will still be possible to use all instruments individually.
Work has now started to create space for the new platform in the Tandem Lab’s largest accelerator hall by moving the wall that separates the experimental end stations from the workshop areas and control room. The wall is there for radiation safety and consists of individual concrete blocks, each weighing up to 1000 kg. Due to the weight of the blocks, the wall needed to be taken apart block by block. The research engineers lifted out every single block with a forklift and stored them temporarily outside the Ångström Laboratory. In a second step the wall was reconstructed in its new position.
Space for LigHt. The new wall position creates approximately 36 square metres additional space in the radiation protection area for the new platform. Photo: Bart Royeaerd
“The new wall is longer, so we got additional blocks that have been decommissioned from the The Svedberg Laboratory. In total, we moved about 50 tons of material,” says Bart Royeaerd, senior research engineer at the Tandem Laboratory.
The now freed space will hopefully not stay empty for long – procurement of the new instrumentation has already been started.
Svenja Lohmann