Machine availability is a measure of the reliability of a synchrotron in providing beam for users. At the Australian Synchrotron we define this as the amount of beamtime we actually delivered from the machine as a proportion of the amount of beamtime we scheduled over the past four months.

In slightly more technical terms, machine availability is a product of ‘mean time between failures’ or MTBF (a failure being an unscheduled beam loss) and ‘mean down time’ (when there is a beam loss, how long it takes us to get back up and running again). This is the primary indicator of machine performance in synchrotron light sources. Most facilities target, but don’t always achieve, machine availability figures above 95 percent, and the best in the world typically sit in the range 98-99 percent.

Our facility has consistently had extremely high availability since we began user operations in 2007, achieving figures in excess of 98 percent for the past four years. In November 2011 we hit our highest machine availability ever, achieving 99.1 percent. This is a testament to the great work of our engineers and physicists for constantly working to make the machine more reliable, and to the technicians and operators who maintain and repair the machine and spring into action to fix it when there is a fault.