Current Issue Feature: Chemistry
Q&A with Tom Ellis
Bright Light, Big Science
Canada’s synchrotron is six years old and fulfilling its expectations
The world’s first synchrotrons were add-ons to facilities built to study subatomic physics. Every time electron beams went through a bending magnet, they lost energy in the form of synchrotron light. Previously just an annoyance to subatomic physicists, synchrotron light is now used in more than 40 facilities around the world to study everything from soils to drugs to alternative fuels as scientists use it to gather information about the structural and chemical properties of materials at the molecular level. In 2004, the Canadian Light Source (CLS) opened its doors on the University of Saskatchewan campus, giving Canada its first synchrotron facility. ACCN spoke with Tom Ellis, director of research at CLS, to see how the first six years have paid off.
ACCN:The Canadian Light Source has been operating for about six years now. Has it lived up to expectations?
T.E.:I believe that we have. The expectations of course are very high for such a high profile project. One of the ways that we try to compare ourselves is to look at other international facilities. We’re constantly asking ‘how are we doing compared to other new facilities?’ The answer we get back very consistently is ‘You’re doing well on an international standard.’ It takes a long time to develop these facilities. It takes a few years to build user communities and sometimes we have growing pains. But it’s always interesting that the international committee goes “Yep, been there, done that. You’re following the same trajectory that everybody else did and you’re doing well.”
ACCN:So what’s the measurement of success?
T.E.:That’s an issue that’s very common, not just to CLS but to the entire scientific community in Canada. We’re being asked more and more “What are the outputs and outcomes? What are the measures of success?” For NSERC programs, for CIHR, for government research labs — everybody’s trying to address that question and there are no easy answers because it basically comes down to quantity and quality. You need both. So it’s not sufficient just to say “We’ve had 100 publications,” because it’s not just bean counting. You need to know the quality of the publications. But at the same time, if the numbers aren’t there, then it’s hard to justify things. We look at both sides, both the outputs and outcomes but also, what is the level of demand, are people coming to us, looking to use our facility?”
ACCN:Have there been any let downs?
T.E: No major bumps at all. Sometimes because of inflation or construction costs, you have to do a bit less than what you originally planned for, you have to make some choices. But we’ve delivered on the primary goals and we’ve done that within the budgets that we were allocated and we’re pretty proud of that.
ACCN:Tell me briefly how it works.
T.E: Unlike impressions some people might have of a major science project where you’re basically doing one big experiment, we are a research facility where many people from many different backgrounds — chemists, physicists, engineers, biologists, veterinary scientists, medical researchers, environmental scientists — come to do their experiments. What they have in common is they’re using synchrotron light. Picture our facility as a WalMart-sized building and in the middle of it is this large storage ring. So the core of our facility is a series of three particle accelerators that accelerate electrons up to relativistic energies. Electrons are going around and around at near the speed of light in the storage ring, which is a circular ring of a large diameter, and as they go around, they are generating many different intense beams of radiation. We have various openings in the storage ring where the beams of light come out. The whole purpose is for people to use that light to do their experiments. That light covers the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum all the way from the terahertz, low energy, all the way up to the high energy x-rays. Any particular beamline is using a portion of that electromagnetic spectrum and tuning the light over a part of that spectrum.
ACCN:What, specifically, does CLS provide that can’t be achieved through other means?
T.E: There are very few ways to make broadly tuneable radiation. For example, take the analogy of a laser. A laser produces an intense beam of light. It’s coherent, it’s focused into a beam and in some cases, it’s tuneable. That would be another example of a light source. So if you have a laser available that exists to do an experiment, you wouldn’t come to a synchrotron. But lasers tend to fall into the visible spectrum and a little bit into the UV and a little bit down into the infrared, but as you get down into the rest of the infrared or into x-rays there are no laser facilities. Synchrotron is the only game in town. If you want to use that type of radiation, in terms of a tuneable beam, you basically have to come to a synchrotron facility.
ACCN:Your website describes CLS— the only synchrotron in Canada — as a “much-needed national R&D facility.” Much-needed in what way?
T.E: Science is driven by people trying to solve scientific questions. They could be either very fundamental science questions or they could be very practical questions. They need techniques and they will have available to them a range of techniques. If they know about what synchrotrons can do, then often they will say “In order to answer this particular question, I need to know the structure of this particular protein or I need to know the local chemical environment of some atoms in this particular nanomaterial. I need to get this particular information and I know the synchrotron will do it for me.” In many cases, the synchrotron experiment is part of a larger program that people have, but often it can be the key piece of information that they need to get from a synchrotron.
ACCN:Where would we be without it?
T.E:If people had no access to synchrotrons then a lot of science wouldn’t be done. We can take the example of drug discovery. Much in the field of rational drug discovery is based on knowing the structure of proteins and knowing how various forms of molecules will interact with these proteins and have certain effects. A whole branch of that just wouldn’t exist. If we didn’t have the Canadian Light Source, people would be doing what they did before and travelling abroad and getting beam time at foreign facilities. That works up to a certain point but having a facility in Canada has its advantages. It’s not just proximity because of course Canada is a very big country and to travel from one part of Canada to another is still a big investment in travel. All of our beamlines have been proposed by the Canadian scientific community. All of the beamlines that we have have come about to meet the particular needs of the Canadian scientific community.
ACCN:What, in your opinion, has been the most exciting research done at CLS so far?
T.E:Do you want me to tell you who my favourite children are? (Laughing) It’s hard for me to do that. I can give you a few examples. One that was done by an academic researcher that received worldwide attention was professor Ken Ng from the University of Calgary. He was trying to understand the Norwalk virus and trying to understand the mechanism by which the virus reproduces itself, with a particular thought that by understanding this there would be a way to disrupt it. It got quite a bit of attention in Canada. It also got a huge amount of attention in Britain because there happened to be a major outbreak of Norwalk virus in Britain at the time so the newspapers picked it up. So it’s just one example of literally hundreds of examples of exciting research that’s being done on protein structure.
We do have a unique facility that’s a medical imaging beamline. It’s one of our newest beamlines. It has only been in operation for about a year now in its testing stages. It basically uses x-rays to do imaging but unlike a conventional medical x-ray that you might get in a hospital, which is mostly used to detect bones and hard tissue, x-rays generated by the synchrotron can reveal much more information about soft tissue. Or it could be more chemically selective imaging.
One of the areas that we see, where the Canadian Light Source is going to be a world leader is in the imaging of bones and joints. So it’s not just looking at the bone itself, we’ll be able to see the cartilage and all the soft tissue around the bones and joints. People working in the field of osteoarthritis and osteoporosis are quite excited and as it turns out, in western Canada, both at the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Calgary, there is a world-class group of researchers who are doing bone and joint imaging. They are very excited and are part of the first user community.
In the broad category of nanomaterials, what a synchrotron can do is give information about molecular structure and the local chemical environments of atoms. For almost any material, particularly complex material, because of the tunability of the x-rays, we can zoom in on a particular element and find out what that element is doing in a particular material. Even if that material is not a crystalline material, highly ordered, there are synchrotron techniques that can give you local order. Those two properties together, the natural ability of synchrotrons to be strong in that particular area, lends itself to people who are creating new nanomaterials.
ACCN:How does the CLS rank at an international level? Is there something that we do particularly well in Canada?
T.E:Our biomedical imaging beamline is considered to be one of the best. We’re also unique because we designed an experimental hutch to do experiments that can accommodate large animals, up to horses and cows. We’re the only synchrotron in the world where horses and cows will be coming in to be imaged.
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