Bulletin

Issue: September/October 2007

News

La Trobe University in new Synchrotron partnership

La Trobe University is a foundation member of the recently opened Australian Synchrotron. The University has signed up for a $2.5 million five-year beamline partnership in association with a group of South Australian Universities. Beamline partners have preferential access to 30 per cent of the facility’s capacity.

La Trobe research being carried out on this state-of-the-art facility – as articles on the following pages reveal – ranges from how phosphate fertilisers, and major pollutants such as chromium, behave in different types of soil, to the design of better malaria drugs.

Vice-Chancellor, Professor Paul Johnson, says the partnership will enable La Trobe scientists and postgraduate students regular access to the Synchrotron as an education and research tool.

The instrument will be particularly useful for University water research units based along the Murray River, at its Albury-Wodonga and Mildura campuses, as well as for joint facilities with the Department of Primary Industries on the R&D Park on the main Melbourne campus at Bundoora.

Used for leading-edge research and teaching, Professor Johnson says the Synchrotron will be available to researchers and students from all campuses. It will support research in the physical and biological sciences, from nanotechnology, chemistry and materials science to surface physics.

‘It will assist our students by enabling them to develop expertise that will stand them in good stead for furthering their scientific and industrial careers here and abroad,’ Professor Johnson says.

La Trobe team builds state-of-the-art analyser for Synchrotron

A team of La Trobe University physicists has also designed and built the world’s most advanced toroidal electron spectrometer for delivery to the Synchrotron next year.

An end station attached to the soft X-ray beam line of the Synchrotron, the spectrometer is expected to open up a field of surface analysis in Australia which until now has had to be carried out overseas.

Professors Robert Leckey and John Riley have been working for more than 30 years perfecting the analytical techniques at the heart of the $1.5 million machine.

Carrying a La Trobe University patent, this equipment has already proved its worth and is used at the synchrotron in Berlin by five groups from German universities and research institutes and by a group from an Austrian university.