Synchrotron Radiation Center

Synchrotron Radiation Center

Motto	"Illuminating the path to scientific discovery"
Established	1968
Research type	Synchrotron light source
Director	Joseph Bisognano
Operating agency	University of Wisconsin-Madison
Website	http://www.src.wisc.edu/

Coordinates: 42°57′40″N 89°17′26″W / 42.9611°N 89.2905°W / 42.9611; -89.2905

The Synchrotron Radiation Center (SRC), located in Stoughton, Wisconsin and operated by the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was a national synchrotron light source research facility, operating the Aladdin storage ring. From 1968-1987 SRC was the home of Tantalus, the first storage ring dedicated to the production of synchrotron radiation.

15 universities formed the Midwest Universities Research Association (MURA) in 1953 to promote and design a high energy proton synchrotron, to be built in the Midwest. With the intent of constructing a large accelerator, MURA purchased a suitable area of land with an underlying flat limestone base near Stoughton, Wisconsin, about 10 miles from the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin.

MURA's first accelerator was a 45 MeV synchrotron, built in a concrete underground "vault", mostly for radiation protection purposes. A small electron storage ring, operating at 240 Mev, was designed by Ed Rowe and collaborators as a test facility to study high currents, and construction of this ring started in 1965. However, in 1963 President Johnson had decided that the next large accelerator facility would not be built at the MURA site, but in Batavia, Illinois - this became Fermilab. In 1967 MURA dissolved with the storage ring incomplete and with no further funding. The researchers, feeling teased by fate (and the government backers) named the machine after the mythological figure Tantalus, famed for his eternal punishment to stand beneath a fruit tree with the fruit ever eluding his grasp.