VIC - School Holiday - ANSTO - Australian Synchrotron

Please join us during the Victorian school holidays for a truly interesting tour of the Australian Synchrotron.  Tickets are $15 per person. 

The guided tour will have a maximum of 15 people.  Children must be at least 12 years old.   After the tour ends TOCA members can catchup over coffee or have lunch at the Wheelers Hill Hotel.  https://www.wheelershillhotel.com.au/dining#dining-room-1-section  Credit to Mr William Hancock for suggesting the Wheelers Hill Hotel.

The guided tour will only have 15 people and a presenter will explain the technology and research that is going on in the facility.

How it works

In simple terms, a synchrotron is a vey large circular, gigavolt particle accelerator about the size of a football field.  From the outside, the Australian Synchrotron, for example, looks like a football stadium.  But on the inside, it's very different.  Instead of grass and seating, there is a vast circular network of interconnecting tunnels and high tech apparatus. 

Synchrotrons use electrons to produce intense beams of light more than a million times brighter than the sun. The light is produced when high-energy electrons are forced to travel in a circular orbit inside the synchrotron tunnels by the ‘synchronised’ application of strong magnetic fields.

The electron beam travels just under the speed of light - about 299,792 kilometres a second. The intense light they produce is filtered and adjusted to travel into an experimental workstation, where light reveals the innermost, sub-macroscopic secrets of materials, from human tissue to plants to metals and more.