Canadian Light Source looks ahead to major upgrades, milestones in 2025

Research has wound down and staff at Canada’s only synchrotron are getting ready for the holidays.

But the new year promises to be an exciting one at the Canadian Light Source (CLS).

With more than a thousand different users coming through the doors from nine different provinces and 28 different countries in 2024, a variety of critical questions to intricate problems were answered on one of the 22 beamlines.

“We can look inside matter,” said Ingrid Pickering, chief science officer at CLS. “We can look inside materials in a way that you can’t do anywhere else in Canada. So, it’s incredibly valuable to so many different areas of research.”

The team at CLS focus on four strategic areas of study.

“We have advanced materials, we have environment, we have agriculture, and then we also have health,” she said. “And all of those resonate in many ways with many people.”

According to the CLS annual report, 61 per cent of research time was spent on advanced materials. Equal portions were spent on health and the environment, with agriculture taking nine per cent of the total research time.

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From looking at seeds to improve crops, finding trace elements of concern in the environment or health topics like osteoporosis or heart disease, Pickering says the energy in the facility is infectious when users are hard at work on the beamlines.

“We have 22 stations that run simultaneously, so all the time we have a whole spectrum of science coming from different places,” Pickering told CTV News. “So, this wonderful variety of things happening all the time simultaneously, and that’s one of the beauties of a facility like this. It draws in people from all sorts of disciplines, and in some ways that is this melting pot, this bringing together of people. Bringing together of keen minds, to wrestle with challenges and to understand them, and to provide the answers with challenges that are of great concern to people here in Saskatchewan and in Canada.”

Pickering says the machines are so expensive to run that no graduate student or researcher would be able to afford the access time, so it’s only $1 per eight-hour shift.

“I like that, because that means if your science is good enough, you can come no matter what your means,” she said.

The trade off is that researchers publish their findings publicly.

If private industries want to perform research but protect their findings, those clients can pay for the access and privacy of their data at a cost.

With countless upgrades over the years, one key piece is being completely replaced.

The facility has been shut down for six months while staff install a new linear accelerator (LINAC).

“The LINAC is sort of the heart of the machine,” she said. “It’s deep underground so we can’t see where it is, but it’s a long series of tubes, if you like, to accelerate the electrons up to a very fast speed before they come up to this level. Then they get injected first into the booster ring, which is the central ring, and then come into the storage ring which is the outer ring. From there, as they’re bent around corners, they give off light, and then the light comes down fancy tubes to scientists, who use the light to discover things about their samples.”

The original LINAC has been in operation for decades, but maintenance was becoming more expensive than a new unit.

“The original LINAC actually dates back to the 1960s,” she said. “If you think about technology in general, that’s very, very old.”

With the excitement of another year of research ahead, Pickering says 2025 has something else in store for the CLS.

“We’re also looking forward to a little bit of an anniversary,” she said. “It will be our 20th anniversary of the first user of the Canadian Light Source.”

The new LINAC is expected to be online early next year.