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.

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ALSNews           Vol. 114          October 28, 1998

Table of Contents


    1. SUCCESSFUL USERS' MEETING INTRODUCES NEW SCIENCE, NEW AWARD
    2. BEAMLINE COORDINATION SECTION HEAD TO START NOVEMBER 16
    3. STAFF AND USERS PHOTO TO BE TAKEN MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2
    4. WHO'S IN TOWN: A SAMPLING OF ALS USERS
    5. OPERATIONS UPDATE

1. SUCCESSFUL USERS' MEETING INTRODUCES NEW SCIENCE, NEW AWARD
By Annette Greiner (Contact: W_Meyer-Ilse@lbl.gov)

On Thursday and Friday, October 22 and 23, ALS users convened in Berkeley for a bustling annual meeting. The third major scientific gathering hosted by the ALS this year, the meeting enjoyed an increase in attendance from last year, with 195 nonvendor participants and 37 vendors. With three times as many submitted abstracts as last year, the scientific sessions focused on how the ALS can contribute to future frontiers of research.

Thursday's opening session included welcomes from Users' Executive Committee (UEC) Chair Werner Meyer-Ilse, Berkeley Lab Director Charles Shank, and DOE Associate Director for Basic Energy Sciences Patricia Dehmer. Deputy Berkeley Lab Director Pier Oddone reported on the activities of the ALS User Task Force, for which he served as chair, and ALS Director Daniel Chemla gave a progress report and an update on the scientific direction of the light source. A session on time-resolved studies and a UEC town meeting completed the morning's agenda. The afternoon began with poster sessions and vendor exhibits in parallel with working-group sessions for new initiatives. Next came a wide-ranging selection of highlights from young researchers, followed by the first of two sessions on nanotechnology and magnetics.

Thursday's program ended with a banquet at Le Cheval restaurant in Oakland. Awards were given for excellence in service and in science. The UEC honored administrative staff and conference organizers whose excellent work ensured that the event ran smoothly. Eli Rotenberg (ALS) again won the t-shirt design award with his "Another Starry Night Shift," based on Van Gogh's impressionist masterpiece. The User Services Award was given to Tim Renner for his dynamic efforts as a member of the ALS Experimental Systems Group. The Halbach Award for Outstanding Instrumentation at the ALS went to Ken Goldberg and Patrick Naulleau (both of the Berkeley Lab Center for X-Ray Optics) for the measurement of wavefront errors with an accuracy of 1/300 of the wavelength of extreme ultraviolet radiation (13 nm) using advanced EUV/x-ray interferometry techniques. The David A. Shirley Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement at the ALS was shared by two research teams: Stephen Kevan (University of Oregon) and Eli Rotenberg received the honor for performing a suite of state-of-the-art experiments measuring the electronic structures from surfaces of materials, and Anders Nilsson (Uppsala University, Sweden) was recognized for groundbreaking experiments in soft x-ray fluorescence, specifically the nature of chemical bonds at surfaces. The winner of the first-ever student poster contest was Seth Harris, who conducted protein crystallography studies to determine the crystal structure of the human papilloma virus 18 E2.

Friday morning's discussions featured topics in biology and environmental science and the second session on nanotechnology and magnetics. These were followed by posters and vendor exhibits, along with further working group sessions for new initiatives. A session on light sources and facilities, including progress at MaxLab, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, and the ALS, came next. The day's final session offered highlights of new science at the ALS, which gave a hint of the many directions in which ALS science may take users in the future.

2. BEAMLINE COORDINATION SECTION HEAD TO START NOVEMBER 16
(Contact: DJHamamoto@lbl.gov)

The Beamline Coordination Section of the User Services Group will soon have a new leader, Donna Hamamoto. Beginning Monday, November 16, Donna will fill the opening created by the departure of Ray Thatcher. As head of the beamline coordinators, she will assist users with various on-the-floor needs and serve as the primary liaison between users and available ALS and Berkeley Lab resources. Donna currently serves as a research associate in the Life Sciences Division's Biological Microscopy Group. Her work has involved protein labeling and imaging with the x-ray microscope at Beamline 6.1.2 (as well as with confocal and conventional microscopes) to study protein localization in cells. She also supervises and manages the cell culture facility for the ALS soft x-ray microscopy program. Donna will be working under User Services Group Leader Gary Krebs.

3. STAFF AND USERS PHOTO TO BE TAKEN MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2
(Contact: EJMoxon@lbl.gov) All ALS staff and users are asked to join the annual photo session on Monday, November 2, at 10:15. This year, two photographs will be taken: one with ALS staff and users, and one with ALS staff only. The photographer, Roy Kaltschmidt, will be shooting in the upper parking lot off "Sally's Alley" (at the south end of Building 7), using the picturesque ALS dome as his backdrop. He requests that subjects avoid wearing obvious plaids or stripes and that they wear solid-color medium to medium-dark clothing. It will take about 15 minutes to set up the joint photo, which will be taken at 10:30. The shutter will click again for the staff-only photo at 10:40.

4. 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: Hoi-Ying Holman and Regine Goth-Goldstein (Berkeley Lab) will study the uptake of toxins in human liver cells. Miqin Zhang (Univ. of California, Berkeley) will assess the biocompatibility of microfabricated surfaces and medical devices.

Beamline 8.0: Franz Himpsel (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) and Lou Terminello (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) will use the EMA analyzer for materials science studies.

Beamline 9.0.2.2: Gary Jarvis (Berkeley Lab) and Yang Song (Iowa State Univ.) will be conducting pulsed-field ionized photoelectron-photoion coincidence spectroscopy (PFI-PEPICO) on various compounds.

Beamline 10.0.1.1: Scot Kellar, Pasha Bogdanov, Xing Jiang Zhou, and Z.X. Shen (Stanford University) will continue commissioning the High Energy Resolution Spectrometer for studies of highly correlated materials.

Beamline 10.0.1.3: Edwin Kukk, Nora Berrah (Western Michigan University) will perform high-resolution electron spectroscopy on simple molecules.

Beamline 10.3.1: Henry Hieslmair (Univ. of California, Berkeley) will be studying iron interactions with oxygen precipitates in Czochralski silicon (the standard material used in the integrated circuit industry). Polycrystalline silicon solar cells from Santo Martinuzzi (University of Marseille, France) will also be examined.

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

Beam reliability for the last two weeks was 99% overall and 99% for user shifts. There was no significant down time.

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.