1. BES REVIEW: GREAT STRIDES MADE, FURTHER STEPS POSSIBLE
(Contact: NVSmith@lbl.gov)

Reviewers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Sciences (DOE BES) report that the ALS is an "extraordinary asset to the scientific community" and that recent developments such as the superbend upgrade are "clearly revolutionary." According to review committee chair Pedro Montano of the BES Materials Science and Engineering Division, an "increase in the scope and quality" of ALS science was the "dominant impression" left on the review committee members. "The changes that have taken place in recent years in management and operation," wrote Montano in a letter summarizing the reviewers' comments, have made the ALS "our premier facility for UV and soft x-rays." However, the reviewers also identified several concerns and made a number of recommendations, noting that there are "great opportunities for improvements and efficient use of resources even in a well-run productive national facility."

The review--one in a series of reviews of the four DOE-funded synchrotron light sources--took place in February at the ALS, where the reviewers spent two days talking and listening to representatives of the facility's management, staff, and users. A list of questions posed by the reviewers to the ALS involved issues such as beamtime allocation, alternatives to participating research team (PRT) models, cost effectiveness, and future trends, plans, and potential problems. Bill Oosterhuis of BES gave a presentation on the light source reviews to a meeting of the full BES Advisory Committee on July 23.

Concerns identified by reviewers in their report included "troubled" PRTs, prioritizing investments in the various photon energy ranges, ensuring a sufficient user community for a proposed infrared ring, and fine-tuning spending between the Scientific Support Group and Experimental Systems Group. The reviewers' list of recommendations included centralizing the beamline scheduling process, transferring operation of BES beamlines from PRTs to the ALS, increasing beamline support staff, and providing insertion devices and front ends for all new BES beamlines. ALS Division Deputy for Science Neville Smith and User Services Group Leader Gary Krebs plan to meet with BES officials at DOE Headquarters in early August to respond to the concerns raised by the review and discuss ways to implement its recommendations.

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

The User's Executive Committee met on July 17. I will briefly summarize the meeting.

We had a discussion of the visit to Washington, D.C., by light-source user representatives (including our Harald Ade and Jennifer Doudna) to tell legislators about science at the light sources. This annual activity seems to be very useful for educating legislative and executive staff about the successes of the investment in DOE science facilities. We plan to continue this effort with twice-annual visits to Washington. A briefing packet is available from Harald (harald_ade@ncsu.edu) for users who wish to contact their local congressional representatives.

Planning for the October 10 - 12 Users' Meeting is proceeding; Eli Rotenberg (ERotenberg@lbl.gov) and John Bozek (JDBozek@lbl.gov) are the co-chairs. Details will be mailed out to users soon; in addition, the meeting Web site at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/usermtg/ will be updated as new information becomes available. Several workshops associated with the meeting are being planned, and suggestions for additional workshops are welcome (contact Eli or John). In addition to presenting a strong scientific program, we plan to conduct a town meeting as usual to discuss issues and to finalize the nominations for new members of the UEC. (Please consider running for election!)

Three proposed changes to the ALS were extensively discussed. These include "centralized scheduling" (a more centralized way of allocating and recording beamtime), "approved programs" (a new mode of beamline organization for core groups of users), and increased scientific and technical staff to assist users as the ALS assumes increased responsibility for the operation of beamlines. The UEC gave input to ALS management on these topics. The ALS is currently in discussion with the DOE regarding these changes, and we expect to hear more soon.

Planning for an expansion of housing units for visitors is underway, with a recently formed Berkeley Lab committee looking at long-term solutions such as a building for on-site housing. Gary Krebs and Bob Camper, head of the Berkeley Lab Facilities Department, have been appointed co-chairs of the committee by Sally Benson, Berkeley Lab's Deputy Director. For the near term, ALS management has promised to look at increasing the number of apartments available. The current ALS apartments are a highly utilized resource and a successful program.

3. SAC TACKLES FULL AGENDA
(Contact: GFKrebs@lbl.gov)

The ALS Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) addressed a wide range of topics during a recent two-day meeting held at the ALS on July 18 - 19. The SAC meets at least twice yearly to advise Berkeley Lab and ALS management on issues relating to ALS operations, resource allocation, strategic planning, and PRT proposals and performance. At this latest meeting, SAC members heard and discussed reports on a number of important reviews, including the SAC-requested magnetic materials cross-cutting review, the Beamline 7.0.1 PRT review, and the recent review by DOE BES (see item 1 above). The committee spent some time discussing implementation of a more centralized "approved programs" model to replace the current PRT beamline organization. Proposals for a superconducting undulator femtosecond slicing source, an meV elliptically polarizing undulator (EPU) beamline, and a high-pressure superbend beamline were presented, along with supporting talks on new scientific opportunities in nanomagnetism, ultrafast science, soft x-ray inelastic scattering, and coherent infrared spectroscopy.

In attendance at this meeting were SAC members Jeffrey Bokor (Univ. of California, Berkeley), John Carruthers (Intel Corp.), Wolfgang Eberhardt (BESSY GmbH, Germany), Roger Falcone (Univ. of California, Berkeley), Yves Idzerda (Montana State Univ.), Chair Stephen D. Kevan (Univ. of Oregon), Alain Manceau (Berkeley Lab), Anders Nilsson (Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory/Stockholm Univ., Sweden), Sunil Sinha (Univ. of California, San Diego), John Spence (Arizona State Univ.), Anthony Starace (Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln), and Louis J. Terminello (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). This was the last meeting for Manceau, Bokor, and Terminello, who will rotate off the SAC. New members will be added soon to replace the three who are leaving.

4. 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. (The ALS will be operating in two-bunch mode August 6 - 19.)

Beamline 1.4.3
Neli Tsibakhashvili (Georgian Academy of Sciences, Republic of Georgia)
Hoi-Ying Holman (Berkeley Lab)

Beamline 4.0.2
Dan Waddill (Univ. of Missouri-Rolla)
Nora Berrah (Western Michigan Univ.)

Beamline 5.0.1
Joshua Warren, Jeffrey Taylor (Duke Univ.)
James Bowie, Salem Faham, Hoang Tran, Emiko Bare (Univ. of California, Los Angeles)

Beamline 5.0.2
Catherine Drennan, Tzanko Doukov, Jessica Vey, Fred Berkovitch (Massachusetts Inst. of Technology)
Mark Knapp (Roche Bioscience)
Ben Luisi (Cambridge Univ., UK)

Beamline 5.0.3
Linda Brinen, Ashley Deacon, Mitch Miller (Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory)
Gyorgy Snell (Syrrx, Inc.)

Beamline 7.0.1
Z.Q. Qiu (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Ivan Schuller (Univ. of California, San Diego)
Satish Myneni (Princeton Univ.)

Beamline 7.3.3
King-Ning Tu (Univ. of California, Los Angeles)

Beamline 8.0.1
Dennis Lindle (Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas)

Beamline 10.0.1
Nora Berrah (Western Michigan Univ.)
Z.X. Shen (Stanford Univ.)

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

For the user runs of July 9 - 14, 17 - 22, and 23 - 28, the beam reliability (time delivered/time scheduled) was 97%. Of the scheduled beam, 85% 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.