The Iranian Light Source Facility: A Citadel of Science & Engineering

This report is an attempt to demonstrate the high education capacity in the Islamic Republic of Iran both in terms of the number of universities and research institutions and also the quality of education in this country. It also describes the Challenges and opportunities faced by Science & Engineering education from 1970s to present.   

During year 1970s-2000s there has been a boom in the number of universities and as a result a huge increase in the number of graduates in science, medicine and engineering. At the same period Iran’s collaboration with the European and American laboratories were badly affected by imposing a series of unfair sanctions on Iran which aimed at isolating Iranian scientists. It banned scientists from importing fossils, downloading software, subscribing international Science journals and buying much needed equipment from abroad. Sanction even denied freedom of movements to hundreds of scientists to visit laboratories and to meet fellow scientists.

Despite sanctions, however, Iran joined CERN (..) In 2001 and SESAME, Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East in 2004. SESAME was the first and the only large scale facility in which Iran was a member. SESAME provided the opportunity for the Iranian scientists to “visit” and “be in touch” with other facilities in Far-East and occasionally in Europe.

Today, Iran enjoys the advantage of having a student population of 4.6- 4.8 million registered in 390 state and private run universities 2 million of which study science, engineering and medicine. The number of M.Sc. Students exceeds 400,000 and number of Ph.D. Students is close to 40,000.

Under such a high demand for large scale research facility, the Iranian Light Source Facility launched. ILSF or any such laboratory could underpin research and innovation for more than a few thousands of scientists from the Iranian universities and the universities in the region. A few hundred Ph.D. students will gain experience and training in state of the art experimental techniques.

ILSF is now going through basic design stage, a very well trained group of 50 accelerator physicists and engineers are designing the machine. The no of project technical staff will soon increase to up to 100. The project will be based in a land of 50 hectares’ area in a city of Qazvin an ancient city 190 Km West of Tehran. Site selection and geotechnical measurements have been completed. At the same time, R&D work on some major accelerator components have been carried out. Cash flow is partly guaranteed and we hope with the present positive political development between Iran, Europe and the United States, we could attract more support by the US scientists. ILSF is looking forward to more international partnerships & researches. We invite scientists & technicians from all over the world to engage in collaborative programs with Iranian scientists