Oxfordshire scientists are carrying out truly record-breaking research -- the Guinness Book of Records says.

Two research facilities at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Didcot -- the Vulcan laser and the Isis pulsed neutron source -- feature in this year's Guinness World Records.

The Vulcan laser is the highest-intensity focused laser in the world, capable of producing a beam with a focused intensity of 1021 watts per cm2.

In plainer English, that is a thousand million million million watts -- which Prof Henry Hutchinson, director of the Central Laser Facility at the Chilton research centre, said was equivalent to all the sunshine falling on the Earth focused onto the end of a single human hair.

Prof Hutchinson said Vulcan was used in collaboration with university scientists from across the UK and abroad for research which is relevant to the production of energy by nuclear fusion and the study of nuclear processes.

Isis -- the largest facility at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory -- is the world's most powerful pulsed neutron source. Covering the size of a football field, it produces 40 thousand million million fast neutrons per second. These are focused into beams allowing scientists to study at a microscopic scale the atomic and molecular arrangements that give materials their unique properties.

Members of both teams gathered for a presentation of certificates by David Hawksett, the science and technology editor of the Guinness Book of Records.

He said: "The good thing is that I did not have to travel across the Atlantic to make the presentations. It is usually in the USA where this sort of work is done."