1. CHEMLA TO STEP DOWN FROM MATERIALS SCIENCES POST

After four years of performing double-duty as director of two large divisions at Berkeley Lab, ALS Division Director Daniel Chemla has announced that he will step down as director of the Lab's Materials Sciences Division (MSD) and focus his attention on the ALS and his own research group. Daniel, who has been MSD director since 1990, was asked by Berkeley Lab Director Charles Shank to take on leadership of the ALS as well in 1998. Since then, Daniel has guided the ALS through a difficult transition period into a new phase of existence: important reviews have been passed, the superbend upgrade has been successful, user numbers are steadily climbing, and future facility developments such as a femtosecond beamline, an ultrahigh-resolution spectroscopy beamline, and a far-infrared ring are in the planning stages. On the materials sciences side (but with implications for the ALS as well), Daniel was instrumental in persuading the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to fund, as part of its Nanosciences Initiative, the Molecular Foundry at Berkeley Lab. With that project approved and well on its way, Daniel felt it was time to step down from MSD and to concentrate on the ALS, where he says "there is a lot of work to do and a lot of exciting things on the horizon." Berkeley Lab Director Shank, who praised Daniel's "extraordinary impact," will begin a search process for an MSD successor in a few weeks. In the meantime, Daniel will continue to manage both divisions until a replacement is found.

2. WITH EPU INSTALLED, MES BEAMLINE READIES FOR FALL DEBUT
(Contact: DKShuh@lbl.gov)

The successful installation of the ALS's second elliptically polarizing undulator (EPU) in Sector 11 of the storage ring during the April shutdown marked an important milestone in the construction of a major new ALS facility: a beamline dedicated to molecular environmental science (MES). MES research focuses on molecular-scale understanding of environmentally important species--their chemical and physical forms, spatial distribution, and reactivity in natural and man-made materials--as well as the processes (chemical and biological) that affect their stability, transformations, mobility, and toxicity. It is an interdisciplinary field involving complex interactions that make high-intensity, tunable synchrotron light an indispensable research tool. The high brightness and flux of the new beamline will allow unparalleled spatial and spectral resolution. A significant fraction of experiments being performed at existing, oversubscribed beamlines at the ALS are MES-related and will benefit from an MES-optimized and dedicated beamline. The project is on track to be completed on schedule and at budget this fall.

Beamline 11.0.2 will produce synchrotron radiation from 75 to 2000 eV with a flux of 10^12 photons/s. The beamline will include a wet spectroscopy endstation (beam size at focal point: 7 x 50 micrometers) and a high-pressure photoelectron spectroscopy endstation; in addition, a scanning transmission x-ray microscope (STXM) will be transferred from Beamline 7.0.1. The research program will exploit the unique capabilities of the endstations coupled to the specialized optical design of the beamline. Its "wet" capabilities will help provide a bridge from model systems to the real world. The spectroscopic tools available in the surface-science-style endstations include microbeam near-edge x-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS), photoelectron spectroscopy (PES), and several methodologies that fall under x-ray emission spectroscopy (XES). Examples of initial studies include the investigation of water, small molecules, and metal ions at representative interfaces. Other planned experiments will explore catalysis under realistic pressure conditions, the nature of liquid surfaces, and the interactions of metal ions with small, mineralogically important particles.

David Shuh (Chemical Sciences Division) is the MES beamline project leader, Tony Warwick is the project manager, Jim Comins is the lead engineer, Steve Marks is the insertion device engineer, and Tolek Tyliszczak is the beamline scientist. Members of the MES research team include Miquel Salmeron (Materials Sciences Division), Glenn Waychunas (Earth Sciences Division), Anders Nilsson (Univ. of Stockholm and Stanford Univ.), Gordon Brown, Jr. (Stanford Univ.), Satish Myneni (Princeton Univ.), Scott Chambers (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Sam Traina (Ohio State Univ.), Brian Tonner (Univ. of Central Florida), Lou Terminello (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), David Clark (Los Alamos National Laboratory), and John Gland (Univ. of Michigan). The MES project is supported by the U.S. DOE, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences, and Division of Materials Sciences.

3. UEC CORNER: NOTES FROM THE USERS' EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
by Roger Falcone
(Contact: rwf@physics.berkeley.edu)

The next meeting of the Users' Executive Committee (UEC) will be held July 17 at Berkeley Lab. Please email me or other members of the UEC with issues or comments for discussion. The agenda now includes planning for the Users' Meeting, housing for visiting users, and a plan for moving away from traditional participating research teams toward a system of smaller, more flexible "approved programs" in an effort to address the realities of third-generation synchrotron sources.

The Users' Meeting is scheduled for Thursday and Friday, October 10 and 11. More information will soon be available on a Web site; the meeting will be chaired by Eli Rotenberg (ERotenberg@lbl.gov) and John Bozek (JDBozek@lbl.gov). We are currently seeking suggestions for workshops to be held in conjunction with the Users' Meeting. Please email the chairs with your ideas for topics and leaders.

4. ALSNEWS TRANSITIONS TO DAILY FORMAT*
(Contact: alsnews@lbl.gov)

The ALSNews survey results are in and the overwhelming majority of respondents requested that ALSNews be delivered daily by HTML-enhanced email with exhaustive machine status updates. . .

*Well, not really. But now that we have your attention, we'd like to point out that there's still time to fill out the ALSNews reader survey (http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/als_news/surveys/2002/). It's quick and painless and provides the rare opportunity to affect the flow of information across your desk. Want more science highlights? Don't care about who's in town? Or perhaps, just possibly, you find the content and format of ALSNews to be fine just the way it is--that's good data too! Many thanks to all those who have already responded; your input is highly valued and much appreciated.

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

Following are some of the experimenters who will be collecting data during the next two weeks at the ALS.

Beamline 1.4.3
Mary Kauffman (Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory)
Karl Nieman (Utah State Univ.)
T.J. Wilkinson (Berkeley Lab)
Felicia Betancourt (Berkeley Lab)
Yi-Chung Lo (Synchrotron Radiation Research Center, Taiwan)

Beamlines 5.0.1, 5.0.2, 5.0.3
Joe Kim, Rashid Syed, Vivian Li (Amgen)
Gyorgy Snell, Jacek Nowakowski (Syrrx, Inc.)
Yvonne Newhouse, Karl Weisgraber, Danny Hatters, Elizabeth Brooks, Clare Peters-Libeu (Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Xiaoling Xie, Ernst Ter Haar (Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc.)
Ed Berry, David Cobessi,Yusef Collins, Li-Shar Huang Berry (Berkeley Lab)
Brian Chapados, Li Fan (The Scripps Research Institute)
Kevin Compher, David Cox (Univ. of Pennsylvania)
Brent Segelke, Tim Lekin, Todd Corzett (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Brenda Schulman, Daniel Minor (St. Jude Children's Research Hospital)
Mark Knapp, Armando Villasenor, Pete Dunten (Roche Bioscience)
Zhang Bao Xu, Weixin Xu (Wyeth-Ayerst Research)
Brigitte Schobert, Janos Lanyi (Univ. of California, Irvine)

Beamline 6.3.1
Dhanesh Chandra (Univ. of Nevada, Reno)
Shuji Matsuo (Fukuoka Univ., Japan)
Ponnusamy Nachimuthu (Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas)

Beamline 7.0.1
Byron Freelon (Berkeley Lab)
Marjorie Olmstead (Univ. of Washington)
Miquel Salmeron (Berkeley Lab)
Satish Myneni (Princeton Univ.)
Brian Tonner (Univ. of Central Florida)
Harald Ade (North Carolina State Univ.)
Jinghua Guo (Berkeley Lab)

Beamline 8.2.1
Alex Nickitenko, Carmen Moure, Bornali Chakravarty (Baylor College of Medicine)

Beamline 8.3.1
David Birdsall, Stehanie Wang (Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Chris Bonagura (Plexxicon, Inc.)
Mark Robien, Doug Davies, Claire O'Neal, Dan Mitchell (Univ. of Washington)
Peter Hwang (Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Maia Vinogradova (Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Andrew Shiau (Univ. of California, San Francisco)

Beamline 9.3.1
James Cotter (Univ. of Nevada, Reno)
Stefano Marchesini (Berkeley Lab)

Beamline 10.0.1
Z.X. Shen (Stanford Univ.)
Erwin Poliakoff (Louisiana State Univ.)
Duane Jaecks (Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln)

Beamline 10.3.2
Alain Manceau (Berkeley Lab)
Andy Smith (Daresbury Laboratory, UK)
Satish Myneni (Princeton Univ.)

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

For the user runs of June 4 - 9 and 11 - 17 (with June 11 and 12 in 1.5 GeV mode), the beam reliability (time delivered/time scheduled) was 95%. Of the scheduled beam, 88% was delivered to completion without interruption. There were no significant outages.

Long-term and weekly operations schedules are available on the Web (http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/accelinfo.html). Requests for special operations use of the "scrubbing" shift should be sent to Bruce Samuelson (BCSamuelson@lbl.gov, x4738) by 1:00 p.m. Friday. 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.

LBNL/PUB-863
Editors: lstamura@lbl.gov, alrobinson@lbl.gov, amgreiner@lbl.gov

This work was supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098.