ALSNews is a biweekly electronic newsletter to keep users and other interested parties informed about developments at the Advanced Light Source, a national user facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California. To be placed on the mailing list, send your name and complete internet address to ALSNews@lbl.gov. We welcome suggestions for topics and content.

Previous Issues are available.


ALSNews           Vol. 111          September 16, 1998

Table of Contents


    1. USERS' MEETING UPDATE
    2. USER PUBLICATION REPORTING RETURNS TO THE WEB
    3. USERS' MEETING T-SHIRT DESIGN CONTEST WINNER ANNOUNCED
    4. NEW CONTACT FOR ALS USER APARTMENTS
    5. WHO'S IN TOWN: A SAMPLING OF ALS USERS
    6. OPERATIONS UPDATE

1. USERS' MEETING UPDATE
(Contact: alsuser@lbl.gov)

Registration materials, hotel information, a preliminary agenda, and other materials for this year's ALS Users' Meeting were mailed during the first week of September. The meeting will be held at the Berkeley Lab Building 50 Auditorium on Thursday, October 22, and Friday, October 23. It will offer oral and poster presentations covering a broad range of synchrotron-related research as well as follow-up discussions about the recommendations from the Workshop on Scientific Directions at the Advanced Light Source held last March. New to this year's meeting are special sessions for research presentations by young researchers and awards for outstanding work by students at the ALS. All those planning to attend this year's Users' Meeting are urged to reserve their accommodations early. Two local hotels (the Hotel Durant and the Shattuck Hotel) have special rates for meeting participants for a limited time only. Visitors staying at these hotels will have shuttle bus service to the Building 50 Auditorium, departing each morning at 7:30 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. Up-to-date information about the 1998 ALS Users' Meeting, including information about accommodation, transportation, registration, and program changes, is available on the Web at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/usermtg/index.html.

2. USER PUBLICATION REPORTING RETURNS TO THE WEB
(Contact: spfujimura@lbl.gov)

A new Web-based system for reporting user publications is now accepting input. If you have made a published contribution to the scientific literature based on work done at the ALS, and have not reported the publication to the User Services Office, you can report it through the new site at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/quickguide/userpubs.html. The new system does not require a user i.d. or password. The form may only be used to report works that have already been published (not those that are in press) and have not previously been reported to the User Services Office. To report corrections or updates to already submitted information, send an email message to spfujimura@lbl.gov.

3. USERS' MEETING T-SHIRT DESIGN CONTEST WINNER ANNOUNCED
(Contact: ejmoxon@lbl.gov)

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's T-shirt design contest. The huge response and the quality and creativity of the submitted designs made the work of selecting a winner particularly challenging. Congratulations go to this year's winner, Eli Rotenberg of the ALS Scientific Support Group (SSG). An honorable mention goes to Scott Kellar, also of the SSG.

4. NEW CONTACT FOR ALS USER APARTMENTS
(Contact: alsrooms@lbl.gov)

Users coming to work at the ALS can now make reservations for accommodations in the ALS User Apartments by contacting Barbara Phillips at (510) 486-ROOM [(510) 486-7666] or by sending email to alsrooms@lbl.gov. The two-bedroom apartments are available on a weekly basis, from Monday to Sunday, at a rate of $245.00 per person. Each bedroom has two beds for a maximum of four people per apartment. The apartments are fully furnished and are conveniently located along the Berkeley Lab shuttle bus route, near the corner of Oxford and Hearst streets. More information about the ALS apartments and other housing options is available on the Web at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/quickguide/housing.html.

5. WHO'S IN TOWN: A SAMPLING OF ALS USERS

To highlight the richness of our user community and help introduce recent arrivals, we offer this listing of some of the experimenters who will be collecting data during the next two weeks at the ALS.

Beamline 1.4.3: Vera Zhuang and Phil Ross (Berkeley Lab Materials Sciences Division) will be commissioning the new grazing-angle-reflectance FTIR spectroscopy endstation for surface-science studies. Hoi-Ying Holman (Berkeley Lab Center for Environmental Biotechnology) will study aerobic transformation of volatile organic contaminants at the bacteria/mineral interface by IR spectromicroscopy.

Beamline 7.3.1.1: Boris Sinkovich (Univ. of Connecticut) and Laurent Nahon (LURE, Univ. de Paris-Sud, France) will study various magnetic microstructures using the PEEM2 photoemission electron microscope. Joachim Stoehr and Jan Luening (both of IBM) will study magnetic hard disks using PEEM2.

Beamline 8.0.1: Franz Himpsel (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) and Lou Terminello (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) will use the EMA analyzer for materials science studies. Joachim Stoehr (IBM) will collaborate with Satish Myneni (Berkeley Lab Earth Sciences Division) on the characterization of organic and inorganic aqueous transition-metal complexes from L-edge spectra and on studies of the environmental chemistry of natural organic molecules.

Beamline 9.3.2: David Shuh (Berkeley Lab Chemical Sciences Division) will conduct spectroscopy for the determination of metal-ion speciation in environmental materials; Chuck Fadley (Univ. of California, Davis; Berkeley Lab) will perform resonant photoemission studies; and Ed Moler (Berkeley Lab) will continue commissioning the FTSX spectrometer.

6. OPERATIONS UPDATE
(Contact: rmmiller@lbl.gov)

Beam reliability for the last two weeks was 96.5% overall and 96.7% for user shifts. All outages were of short duration.

Long-term and weekly operations schedules are available on the Web (http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/accelinfo.html). Weekly operations scheduling meetings are held on Fridays at 3:30 p.m. in the Building 6 conference room. The Accelerator Status Hotline at (510) 486-6766 (ext. 6766 from Lab phones) features a recorded message giving up-to-date information on the operational status of the accelerator.