13. Fence and fog

The murky mass on the right, behind the tree and fence, is the light synchrotron SLS that I've featured here before.

To the left is the bike and pedestrian path. And the road for motorized traffic is to the far left.

PSI and the Aare

We hiked up to Besserstein recently and I got the chance to play with my new second-hand 40mm to 150mm (80mm to 300mm: 35mm equivalent) lens. I'm hardly an expert, and I'm finding that there's much I can learn with it.

One of the interesting things about Villigen is that it is home to the Paul Scherrer Institute, which is the largest Swiss research facility. The topics covered range from the applied such as fuel cells, and cancer therapy using proton beams, to the fundamental such as determining the proton radius. There are people doing ice core studies to measure atompheric pollution, probing unexpected behaviors in magnetic materials and developing new detectors and techniques to "see" closer, better, faster.

They offer tours of the facility (in German). The contact site is the psi forum.

SINQ

I like the way some of the PSI lab buildings are conveniently labelled with enormous letters. In addition to the SLS (the round building in front), part of the SINQ (Swiss spallation neutron source) is visible here.

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The SLS building (detail)

Villigen is home to a national research facility called the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI). The programs at PSI are varied, ranging from elementary particle physics to the life sciences. Pictured here is a detail of the Swiss Light Source (SLS) building which is definitely the most visually arresting of all the structures around the campus. It is shaped like a donut with an outer diameter of 138 m (472 ft) and a height of 14 m. At night, it looks as if a UFO landed in the farmlands. I'm working on finding a vantage point for a night-time shot.

Die Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) ist ein "multidisziplinäres Forschungsinstitut für Natur- und Ingenieurwissenschaften" in Villigen. Hier ist ein Foto von die Synchrotron Lichtquelle Schweiz (SLS).

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