Profile: Daresbury Laboratory

Daresbury Laboratory is profiled in this article. It is one of four research establishments supported by the United Kingdom Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC). The SERC's mission is to support basic and strategic research in Science and Engineering in the UK. In contrast with the other UK Research Councils the SERC discharges its mission mainly through the support of researchers in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), rather than through research in its own laboratories; it builds and operates facilities which are too large, complex or costly to be sited in an individual HEI. Daresbury Laboratory was created 28 years ago to house NINA, a 6 GeV electron synchrotron accelerator devoted to the study of particle physics. NINA closed in 1977 as part of the UK's plans to concentrate such research at CERN in Geneva, and was replaced by three main projects: the synchrotron radiation source (SRS), a dedicated synchrotron radiation facility, the nuclear structure facility (NSF), the UK's only accelerator devoted to the study of the properties of atomic nuclei, and computational science centred on the applications of novel computing architectures. (author)