The writer is a science commentator
For more than a decade, a remarkable facility has been taking shape in southern Sweden. The European Spallation Source, nearing completion in Lund and funded by 13 European countries including the UK, will use the world’s most powerful linear proton accelerator to produce the world’s most powerful source of neutrons.
That matters greatly to science: neutrons, the electrically neutral particles that sit alongside positively charged protons in the nucleus of an atom, can be used to probe the nature and structure of materials, just as X-rays once revealed the double-helix structure of DNA. There are several neutron facilities worldwide, including in the US, UK and Japan.
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