STOKE-ON-TRENT, UK – Engineering firm Midland Tool and Design (MTD) is producing components for use in a facility similar to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The company will manufacture the components for Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute’s SwissFEL (free-electron laser) facility. It will produce large laminations for magnets that will be used to focus and intensify the lasers as they travel through a linear accelerator. The facility was designed to create intense, short flashes of x-ray light and to fire them at extremely high speeds along a 700-m tunnel.

The experiments – beginning in 2015 – will be similar to those at the LHC, which fire tiny particles at each other at the speed of light in an attempt to re-create the big bang and discover exactly how the universe was created.

SwissFEL scientists believe that their investigations will enable them to develop better drugs, more efficient energy systems, ultrafast computers and data storage devices.

“Our components could help find the answers to some fundamental questions, like how we create environmentally friendly supplies of energy and how to develop drugs to eradicate infectious diseases,” said Darren Booton of MTD.