Diamond Light Source Ltd is a Private Limited Company which was constituted following the signing of a Joint Venture Agreement the UK Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and The Wellcome Trust. The UK Government (through STFC) own 86% of the shares in Diamond, with the Wellcome Trust the remaining 14%.

Diamond is a 3rd Generation 3GeV synchrotron light source which has a 1MeV linear accelerator (Linac), and full energy (1MeV-3 GeV) Booster. Top-Up mode became available in 2008. Diamond has been operating since January 2007, when the first 7 beamlines became operatonal. By the end of 2012 the number of operational beamlines will increase to 22, with 32 operational by 2018.

Diamond has many Special Peformance beamlines including:

- I12 (Joint Engineering, Environmental & Processing) - which will be able to provide tomographic data on large engineering components of up to 2 tonnes, with a scanning area of 1m x 1m under real world conditions - a unique feature in Europe and the world. It has a high intensity beam for undertaking diffraction and imaging experiments. (Currently operational).

- I20 (Versatile X-ray Spectroscopy) has a four-bounce monochromator which will allow constant energy resolution and spectral purity of the x-ray beam, in contrast with the other spectroscopybeamlines in Europe. (Operational in 2012).

- I09 (Surfaces & interface structural analysis) isunique in it's ability to analyse samples with both hard and soft X-rays.