Turkey building an accelerator

I'm flying off to Turkey soon -- inshallah, a lot of our students would add here -- so this caught my attention just the other day (physics alert):

Turkey plans an accelerator center

Over the last ten years, Turkish physicists have been working diligently to build a national accelerator center, which would serve as a core science facility and offer increased opportunities for Turkish students. It would be the first accelerator facility in the country, and only the second in the Middle East.

After much planning, excitement is building over the construction of the first phase of the project, a testing and research facility called the Turkish Accelerator and Radiation Laboratory at Ankara, or TARLA for short. Scheduled to be completed in 2012, it will be an Infrared Free Electron Laser, capable of producing an intense laser beam of infrared light for research in a wide variety of sciences ranging from physics to chemistry to biology and medicine.

For everyone reading this who isn't a giant physics nerd, what they ("they" being Turkish physicists) are building is a research facility to boost a beam of electrons to incredibly high speeds. Once the electrons are up to full speed, they get shaken slightly from side to side as they zoom down their otherwise straight path. Shaking the electrons makes them emit infrared light, and done enough times, the light comes out of the other end as a powerful infrared laser beam. If it sounds kind of expensive and useless at first, it's worth mentioning that a lot of advances in the biological, chemical, material, and medical sciences in the past half-century have come from related research at accelerator labs around the world. (To preempt the inevitable suggestion, it's not a nuclear fission facility. Or a black hole factory.)

It's a dorky thing to say, but it's really awesome -- to me, anyway -- to hear about basic research continuing to spread like this across the globe. Hopefully it'll be finished in the near future, and hopefully they'll be able to make good on their plans to expand the accelerator.