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. 118        December 23, 1998

Table of Contents


    1. ENERGY SECRETARY BILL RICHARDSON TOURS ALS
    2. REDESIGNED ALS WEB SITE UNVEILED
    3. "STUDENTS' CORNER" DEBUTS IN MICROWORLDS
    4. LAB CLOSES FOR HOLIDAYS
    5. RECENT ALS PUBLICATIONS
    6. WHO'S IN TOWN: A SAMPLING OF ALS USERS
    7. OPERATIONS UPDATE

1. ENERGY SECRETARY BILL RICHARDSON TOURS ALS
by Lori Tamura

Recently appointed U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Bill Richardson visited Berkeley Lab on December 8. It was his last stop on a tour of the DOE-funded national laboratories. After an address to laboratory employees in the main auditorium, lab officials took Richardson on a two-and-a-half-hour tour of various facilities, including the ALS. The entourage made a stop at Beamline 6.1, where Cathie Magowan and Werner Meyer-Ilse described the malaria research conducted there. Richardson also stopped at the Macromolecular Crystallography Facility at Beamline 5.0, where he was briefed on protein crystallography research. Ron Kolb, Berkeley Lab spokesperson, said the tour was intended to provide "a whirlwind look" at what Berkeley Lab is about and expressed the hope that Richardson would come back soon. During his address, Richardson talked about the importance of basic research and, at one point during the tour, called Berkeley Lab "one of our most important science labs" and pledged his full support for its funding.

2. REDESIGNED ALS WEB SITE UNVEILED
(Contact: Annette_Greiner@lbl.gov)

The ALS Web site (http://www-als.lbl.gov/) has been extensively redesigned to sport a more streamlined and unified appearance. Along with the new look, we have also added new content. One major new component is called "About the ALS," which provides the casual visitor to the site with an overview of what the ALS is and how it works. In addition, the new home page features a rotating display of science highlights, and a new MicroWorlds feature makes its debut (see item 3 below). Some links have been moved in order to make navigation more intuitive, and we have also added a search feature to aid navigation through the new site. Because of the changes, returning users may need to update their bookmarks, although we have attempted to minimize the need for this. Pages that have been superseded will appear with a warning and a link to the new page. Please check out the changes and let us know what you think!

3. "STUDENTS' CORNER" DEBUTS IN MICROWORLDS
by Liz Moxon

What is it like to spend your summer vacation working at the ALS if you are a college student? "Students' Corner," a new section in our educational Web site, MicroWorlds, features articles by and about the students who join ALS staff to work on scientific and engineering projects over the summer. The first contribution to this section is from Noah Bray-Ali, a sophomore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Noah describes the intriguing manner in which he first found out about the ALS, and how he ended up working with scientists on Beamline 9.3.2 last summer. So visit MicroWorlds and read all about Noah, his unusual connection to the ALS, and the research project he worked on in "Noah's Story" (http://www.lbl.gov/MicroWorlds/student/noah.html).

4. LAB CLOSES FOR HOLIDAYS

Everyone at Berkeley Lab, including the ALSNews editors, will take a much-needed break for the holidays. The Lab will shut down on the evening of December 23 and reopen on the morning of January 4. ALS user operations will resume on January 6, and the next issue of ALSNews will be published two weeks later, on January 20. During the holiday closure, the Lab will shut down as much heating and ventilating equipment as possible to reduce costs. However, power will be maintained in Building 6. Anyone wishing to work on site during this time will simply need a current ID badge and parking permit to gain access. Unbadged visitors must have been verified and cleared through the gate by an appropriate host prior to entry. We wish you all a pleasant and relaxing holiday season.

5. RECENT ALS PUBLICATIONS

For those readers who crave more science content in every issue of ALSNews, as well as for those who are simply curious about ALS research results, we cite below a few of the more recent publications that have been generated from work done at the ALS, but which have not yet been covered in a full ALSNews article.

K.E. Flick, M.S. Jurica, R.J. Monnat, Jr., and B.L. Stoddard, "DNA binding and cleavage by the nuclear intron-encoded homing endonuclease I-PpoI," Nature 394, 96 (July 1998).

K.W. McLaughlin, O. Yenen, and D.H. Jaecks, "Production of Purely Spin-Aligned Autoionizing States Which Decay to Orbital-Aligned Ionic States," Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 289 (July 1998).

G. Ohrwall, P. Baltzer, and J.D. Bozek, "Rotational Branching Ratios in N2+: Observation of Photon Energy Dependence by Photoelectron Spectroscopy," Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 546 (July 1998).

A. Foehlisch, N. Wassdahl, J. Hasselstrom, K. Karis, D. Menzel, N. Martensson, and A. Nilsson, "Beyond the Chemical Shift: Vibrationally Resolved Core-Level Photoelectron Spectra of Adsorbed CO," Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 1730 (August 1998).

S.R. Mishra, T.R. Cummins, G.D. Waddill, W.J. Gammon, G. van der Laan, K.W. Goodman, and J.G. Tobin, "Nature of Resonant Photoemission in Gd," Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 1306 (August 1998).

E. Tober, J. Palomares, R. Ynzunza, R. Denecke, Z. Wang, J. Morais, J. Liesegang, Z. Hussain, and C.S. Fadley, "Observation of a Ferromagnetic-to-Paramagnetic Phase Transition on a Ferromagnetic Surface Using Spin-Polarized Photoelectron Diffraction: Gd(0001)," Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 2360 (September 1998).

6. 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 1.4.2: Vera Zhuang, Phil Ross, and Michael Martin (Berkeley Lab) will be aligning and commissioning the new surface-science grazing-incidence reflection setup.

Beamline 1.4.3: Felicia Hendrickson and Robert Glaeser (University of California, Berkeley) will study different conformations of protein microcrystals. Hoi-Ying Holman and Regine Goth-Goldstein (Berkeley Lab) and Ron Sims and Karl Nieman (Utah Water Resource Laboratory) will continue to study the biodegradation of pyrene from a Superfund site in Montana.

Beamline 3.3.2: Jill Hruby and Dale Boehme (Sandia National Laboratories) will be studying low-dose exposure of PMMA. They will also be experimenting with making environmental sensing devices. Dean Wiberg and Beverly Eyre (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) will be exposing PMMA for making waveguide samples for 600-GHz signal transport. Keith Jackson (Berkeley Lab) will be exposing PMMA to make injection molds for micro stepping motors. The first round of PMMA exposures will be for making hex cell heat exchangers for diode laser arrays. Kin Man Yu (Berkeley Lab) will be exposing thin amorphous silicon films to look at the structural relaxation of amorphous networks caused by x-ray excitation.

Beamline 7.3.1.1: Tom Regan (Stanford University) will study antiferromagnetic materials using the PEEM2 endstation.

Beamline 9.0.2.1: Dan Neumark and graduate student Jason Robinson (University of California, Berkeley) will be studying the UV photochemistry of anisole, an intermediate in oxygen atom reactions with aromatic hydrocarbons.

Beamline 9.0.2.2: Ed Grant (Purdue University) will work on the pulsed-field ionized photoelectron spectroscopy of NO2--the first rotationally resolved spectra of a polyatomic ion at this beamline. Manfred Faubel (Max Planck Institute) will study absorption in liquid water.

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

Beam reliability for the last two weeks (December 7-December 20) was 97% overall and 97% 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.