One of the biggest science facilities ever built in the UK begins construction on Wednesday.
The £500m Diamond synchrotron being built in Oxfordshire at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) will probe deep into the basic structure of matter and materials.
Diamond will not be ready until 2006
It will help researchers answer fundamental questions about everything from the building blocks of life to the origin of our planet.
The decision to site the huge, doughnut-shaped facility at the RAL caused a major row in 2000. Politicians from the northwest of England felt the new generation machine should have gone to an existing centre at Daresbury.
Diamond will be the size of a football field. At its heart is a ring-shaped evacuated tube that is surrounded by magnets. These bend and focus a beam of electrons travelling at close to the speed of light.
The X-rays this process produces can penetrate deep into a material and reveal its structure. This information helps scientists to better understand the fundamental workings of matter - such as biological tissues, polymers and catalysts - at the atomic and molecular level.
HOW DIAMOND WILL WORK
Electrons fired into straight accelerator, or linac
Boosted in small synchrotron and injected into storage ring
Magnets bend and focus electrons moving at near light speed
Energy lost emerges down beamlines as highly focused light at X-ray wavelengths
These studies will help them, for example, to design new medicines and high-tech materials, as well as to investigate environmental issues such as climate change.
Diamond will be the biggest new science facility built in Britain for decades.
It will have an estimated 20-year lifetime, but it is expected to be in huge demand.
Dr John Taylor, director general of the UK's research councils, said Diamond would take the knowledge gleaned from the Human Genome Project on to the next level.
"Sequencing the genome was the easy bit," he told BBC News Online.
"The gene is the code for the protein and there may be as many as 200,000 of these in the human body. Most of their function and structure is unknown.
"If we want to get the benefits then one of the big things we have to do is understand these proteins. Diamond will let us do that."
Chief executive of the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC), Professor John Wood, told BBC News Online: "This is a fantastic investment in science for the UK.
"It will mean that international scientists will come here and we expert to see a stream of applications from medicines and genetics to engineering and aerospace."
There is expected to be huge demand for the new facility
There remains great bitterness among scientists at the Daresbury synchrotron facility in Cheshire, which was the first machine of its kind when it became operational in 1980.
They, together with local MPs, campaigned vigorously for Diamond to be built in the northwest.
It was felt the final decision to opt for a site in the south of England was unduly influenced by the French Government who had promised to part-fund Diamond. The French later pulled out of the project to build their own facility.
The funding for Diamond comes from the UK Government through the CCLRC and the medical charity Wellcome Trust.
(Artist impressions by JacobsGIBB Ltd/Crispin WrideArchitectural Design Studio.)