ALSNews Vol. 217, March 5, 2003

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.

1. ALS PRESENTS LONG-RANGE VISION TO DOE
(Contact: NVSmith@lbl.gov)

How will the ALS look 20 years from now? The current vision, as presented to a Department of Energy (DOE) subcommittee last month, involves a light source cluster comprising an upgraded ALS, a Coherent Infrared Center (CIRCE), and a Linac-Based Ultrafast X-Ray Source (LUX). The cases for these developments were made to a subcommittee of the DOE's Office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES) Advisory Committee at a workshop in Rockville, Maryland, on February 22 - 23. The 20-Year BES Facilities Subcommittee, chaired by Sunil Sinha (Univ. of California, San Diego) and Geraldine Richmond (Univ. of Oregon), has been charged with reviewing proposals for major new facilities at BES-sponsored laboratories. The subcommittee's report will be instrumental in creating a 20-year roadmap guiding future developments at the DOE science laboratories. Presenting the case for the ALS upgrade and CIRCE were Neville Smith (ALS Deputy Director for Science), David Robin (Accelerator Physics Group Leader), and Michael Martin (Experimental Systems Group). Steve Leone (Chemical Science Division, Berkeley Lab) and John Corlett (Center for Beam Physics, Berkeley Lab) presented the case for LUX.

At the center of the proposed light source cluster will be an ALS upgraded for increased brightness. Higher brightness will enable ALS users to push the limits of cutting-edge science in core areas that require high energy resolution (e.g., complex materials, inelastic x-ray scattering), high spatial resolution (e.g., thin-film magnetism, spintronics), and high coherence (e.g., cellular biology, materials and nanoscience). Elements of such an upgrade would include increasing the energy of the booster synchrotron from 1.5 to 1.9 GeV, replacing five of the older full-length insertion devices with more advanced devices, upgrading the rf system, modifying the storage ring lattice, and modifying the front ends and adding beamlines. In addition, to avoid the shorter beam lifetimes that would result from running at higher storage-ring currents, the ALS would run in "top-off" mode, in which beam injection would be quasi-continuous rather than periodic, as with the present eight-hour fill schedule.

CIRCE, a small infrared ring to be located atop the ALS booster-ring shielding, would be dedicated to the production of coherent far-infrared and THz radiation. Such a machine would be a revolutionary source for a traditionally difficult spectral region at the border between optics and electronics, namely the "THz gap." The radiation would be coherent because the electron bunch length would be smaller than the wavelength being emitted. A high-power THz source would permit novel studies of ultrafast dynamical properties of materials, molecular vibrations and rotations, low-frequency protein motions, phonons, superconductor bandgaps, electronic scattering, and collective electronic excitations (e.g., charge density waves). More information about CIRCE can be found at http://infrared.als.lbl.gov/CIRCE/.

LUX, a recirculating linac user facility proposed for a site adjacent to the ALS, is designed to address the growing national and international need for ultrafast x-ray scientific research. While scientists have recently begun to perform innovative experiments using synchrotron radiation and the conversion of intense laser pulses into soft and hard x rays, the laser-based x-ray fluxes are low, the signal levels are weak, and the experiments are challenging to perform by individual scientists. The LUX recirculating linac-based facility would increase the x-ray flux by several orders of magnitude and be accessible to a large number of users, with resources available for the set-up of a wide variety of pump-probe experiments using both soft and hard x-rays with ultrashort pulse duration, synchronization, and tunability. The unique design of the facility will encompass an enormous range of pulse properties for each area of specialty--from biology, chemistry, and physics to novel areas such as quantum computing, spintronics, and highly nonlinear phenomena. More information on LUX can be found in Berkeley Lab report number LBNL-51766 (soon to be available in PDF format through the Berkeley Lab Library Reports Catalog at http://www-library.lbl.gov/lbnl_reports/sf).

The following presentation files are available for download:
http://www.sc.doe.gov/production/bes/BESAC/BESAC_Sinha_Richmond_02-25-03.ppt
http://www.sc.doe.gov/production/bes/BESAC/BESAC_Dehmer_02-25-03.ppt

2. IN MEMORIAM: IRAN THOMAS

Iran Thomas, Deputy Director of DOE's Office of Basic Energy Sciences, died Friday, February 28, at his home. "Iran has left a remarkable legacy for the Office of Basic Energy Sciences, the Office of Science, the DOE laboratory system, and the scientific community," wrote Pat Dehmer, BES Director, in announcing Thomas's death. "Iran thought big, often really big. And, as a result, his accomplishments were many and great. He personally created a host of scientific programs and a large fraction of the BES major scientific user facilities that now dot the nation. During his 15-year reign as the Director of the Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering, he became synonymous with its programs and facilities. However, his most enduring legacy will be his philosophy and spirit of innovation, which he passed on to many of us both inside and outside of his DOE home. We will miss Iran greatly." Thomas is survived by his wife, Barbara, his daughters, Sharene and Lauren, and three grandchildren. Notes of condolence may be sent to Barbara at 10844 Game Preserve Road, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20879-3139.

3. SRI 2003 ABSTRACT DEADLINE EXTENDED
(Contacts: sri03@lbl.gov)

The deadline for submitting abstracts for oral or poster presentations at the Eighth International Conference on Synchrotron Radiation Instrumentation (SRI 2003) in San Francisco, August 25-29, 2003, has been extended to Monday, March 17, 2003. All meeting participants are invited to submit abstracts online at http://www.sri2003.lbl.gov/html/abstracts.html.

SRI participants who have already submitted abstracts and wish to make changes may review and edit their abstracts at the Web page cited above.

The main SRI 2003 Web page at http://www.sri2003.lbl.gov/ has additional information, including a description of the meeting site; a preliminary program; online registration; accommodation, travel, and visa tips; tourist links; and a companion sightseeing program.

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 in two-bunch mode March 12 - 23.)

Beamline 1.4.3
Hoi-Ying Holman (Berkeley Lab)
Ted Raab (Carnegie Institution of Washington)

Beamline 4.0.2
Stefan Maat (IBM Almaden Research Center)
Reinhard Doerner (Univ. of Frankfurt, Germany)

Beamlines 5.0.1, 5.0.2, 5.0.3
Jinyu Liu, Shengfen Chen (Berkeley Lab)
Mark Knapp, Armando Villasenor (Roche Bioscience)
Kevin Parris (Wyeth-Ayerst Research)
Clare Peters-Libeu (Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Tom Pauly (Pfizer, Inc.)
Peter Hwang (Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Gyorgy Snell (Syrrx, Inc.)

Beamline 5.3.2
Rainer Fink (Univ. Erlangen, Germany)
Harald Ade (North Carolina State Univ.)

Beamline 6.1.2
Peter Fischer (Max Planck Institute for Metal Research, Germany)

Beamline 7.0.1
Laurent Duda (Uppsala Univ., Sweden)

Beamline 8.0.1
Eberhard Umbach (Univ. Wurzburg, Germany)
Dennis Lindle (Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas)

Beamlines 8.2.1, 8.2.2
Kaushik Ghosh, Yingli Ma (Univ. of Pennsylvania)
Ailong Ke, Jennifer Doudna (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Joseph Mougous (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Jennifer Martin, Anna Aagaard, Cathy Latham (Univ. of Queensland, Australia)
Bhushan Nagar (Univ. of California, Berkeley)

Beamline 8.3.1
Kam Zhang, Graeme Card, Abhinav Kumar (Plexxikon, Inc.)
Gabriel Moncalian, John Jefferson Perry (Berkeley Lab)
Terence Hui, Isabelle Lehoux, Audie Rice, Al Stewart (SUGEN, Inc.)

Beamline 10.0.1
Alfred Mueller (Justus Liebig Univ., Germany)
Yoshiro Azuma (Photon Factory, Japan)

Beamline 10.3.1
Eleanor Blakely (Berkeley Lab)

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

For the user runs of February 19 - 23 and February 25 - March 3, the beam reliability (time delivered/time scheduled) was 96%. Of the scheduled beam, 85% was delivered to completion without interruption. On February 19 there was a systemwide power outage. The time lost with this outage accounts for half of the total lost beam time for this two-run period.

Long-term and weekly operations schedules are available on the Web (http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/schedules/index.html). Requests for special operations use of the "scrubbing" shift should be sent to Bruce Samuelson (ALS-CR@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. A Web page showing the ring status in real time can be found at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/status/.

ALSNews is a biweekly electronic newsletter to keep users informed about developments at the Advanced Light Source, a national user facility located at Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California. To be placed on the mailing list, send your email address to ALSNews@lbl.gov. We welcome suggestions for topics and content. Submissions are due the Friday before the issue date.

LBNL/PUB-875
Editors: lstamura@lbl.gov, alrobinson@lbl.gov, amgreiner@lbl.gov, ejmoxon@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.

ALSNews Vol. 217, March 5, 2003

Previous Issues are available.

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