Fundamental Sciences

Synchrotron facilities provide a resource that can be applied to a number of problems that are of both a fundamental and an applied nature. The fundamental sciences discipline group will be principally devoted to topics that will lead to new concepts and techniques for use on a synchrotron and which do not fall into one of the other discipline groups.

Examples of the activities of this group include the development of novel diffraction methods, the exploration of fundamental constants using x-ray spectroscopy, the development of the discipline of coherent x-ray optics, studies of accelerator science, and the development of the next generation of x-ray sources.

Activities in this group will involve the close collaboration of theoreticians and computational modelling groups with experimentalists working at the Australian Synchrotron and at international facilities. Some of the key areas where greater understanding of fundamental processes occuring in synchrotron based experiments will lead to advances in the application of science to the development of new technologies include:

• Imaging and diffraction
• X-ray, vacuum ultraviolet, and infra-red/visible spectroscopies
• Theoretical modelling of advanced materials, nanostructures, and biological molecules.
• The use of circular dichroism in studies of secondary macromolecular structure