ALSNews Vol. 226, july 9, 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.
Previous Issues are available.
Table of Contents
- ALS Director Reports on State of the ALS
- EUV Lithography Project Wins R&D 100 Award
- Warning: Expect Tighter Security Beginning in August
- Who's in Town: A Sampling of ALS Users
- ALSNews on Summer Hiatus
- Operations Update
1. ALS DIRECTOR REPORTS ON STATE OF THE ALS
In a presentation to ALS staff on June 25, ALS Director Daniel Chemla looked back on the accomplishments of the past year and forward to short- and long-term developments designed to keep the ALS at the cutting edge of third-generation light sources for the next two to three decades. In general, Daniel noted that the ALS has experienced possibly the fastest growth ever by a light source, with 21 new beamlines added in the last four years. The number of ALS users has surpassed 1400 and is projected to reach 1700 by the end of this fiscal year (FY 03). In its 10 years of operation, the ALS has accumulated about $92 M worth of equipment around the machine, of which 41% was from non-Department of Energy (DOE) sources. All this growth, plus a lot of outstanding science and the development of major new initiatives, has made it, according to Daniel, "an amazing year."
Daniel reported that the Molecular Environmental Sciences beamline was completed last fall, and a coherent soft x-ray scattering beamline came online in April. A proposal for an ultrahigh-resolution spectroscopy facility was submitted to the DOE and was recently approved for $2.4 M (FY 03) and $1.1 M (FY 04). PEEM-3 is making good progress, with completion projected to be a year away. Work on a femtosecond slicing source will continue as a research program for the next two years. Development of a GHz-rate detector, 100 to 1000 times faster than present detectors, is well under way, with a full test in the Scienta analyzer at Beamline 4.0.2 scheduled for this summer. Four superbend beamlines are currently under construction (two for protein crystallography and one each for tomography and high-pressure science), leaving five superbend beamlines still available.
All straight sections have been allocated; possible ways to move forward include, as part of an overall upgrade to the ALS, replacing several 4.5-m insertion devices with 2-m insertion devices in chicane arrangements and adding four new beamlines optimized for specific applications. The proposed upgrade would also involve changing the injection and rf systems to accommodate the switch to a "top-up" mode of continuous electron injection. Because the ALS was very well designed, it can be upgraded without major changes to the structure of the machine in two short (six-week) shutdowns. Such an upgrade would result in an increase in brightness of up to two orders of magnitude at a modest cost.
The ALS upgrade proposal was presented to the DOE this year along with proposals for CIRCE, a coherent far-infrared ring, and LUX, a linac-based ultrafast x-ray source (see ALSNews Vol. 217). In response to the upgrade proposal, the DOE requested specifics on how much could be accomplished with various funding levels, information which the ALS has provided. For CIRCE and LUX, the recommendation of the DOE advisory panel was to further gauge national interest in these facilities through "facility neutral" workshops, which are currently being scheduled for the fall and spring, respectively.
Daniel also spent some time describing several examples of outstanding science done at the ALS in the past year. A time-resolved PEEM experiment involving stroboscopic pump-probe measurements produced a "movie" of the motion of magnetic vortices. A study of an "exotic" material--a material subject to extreme temperatures and pressures in a very brief pulse--illustrated the need for time-resolved nanometer-length probes to explore transient chemical species and particle-formation mechanisms. The structure of a membrane protein that recognizes toxins and "spits" them out provided valuable insight into how bacteria develop drug resistance. Finally, Daniel reported on a remarkable demonstration of "lensless" two-dimensional imaging using coherent x-ray diffraction. Daniel closed the presentation by reminding the audience that this year's Users' Meeting will be held October 6 - 8, celebrating the ALS's 10th anniversary of operation; he then thanked all ALS staff members for a terrific year.
2. EUV LITHOGRAPHY PROJECT WINS R&D 100 AWARD
(Contact: attwood@eecs.berkeley.edu)
A technology (developed in part at the ALS) that uses extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light to enable the continued miniaturization of microchips has been recognized with an R&D 100 Award for 2003 from R&D Magazine. Called the "Oscars of Invention," the awards honor the 100 most technologically significant new products of the year. The photolithography techniques that have miniaturized electronics and made today's laptop computers as powerful as a roomful of 1970s-era mainframes will soon reach their natural limit. Printing smaller chip features will require EUV light, whose wavelength is too short to focus with ordinary lenses.
To meet this challenge, Berkeley Lab scientists joined with scientists from Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories to form a DOE Virtual National Laboratory. Together they devised and tested a chip-printing "stepper" that uses coated mirrors instead of lenses to bend and focus light. Contributing to the success of this project were teams working at three beamlines at the ALS, under the auspices of Berkeley Lab's Center for X-Ray Optics. At Beamline 6.3.2, work focused on measuring the reflectivity and uniformity of multilayered molybdenum-silicon coatings, which are central to the EUV lithography process. Beamline 11.3.2 was dedicated to finding tiny defects in lithography masks. Finally, because EUV lithography places extremely high demands on the fabrication of EUV mirror substrates and multilayer coatings, the interferometer at Beamline 12.0.1, touted as the most accurate wavefront-measuring device in the world, was indispensable for characterizing and predicting the performance of the precision optics critical to EUV lithography.
In 2001, the first full-scale prototype demonstrated the possibility of making microprocessors with 10 times as many transistors and memory chips as today's best, operating 10 times as fast and storing 40 times as much information. In 2002, Intel Corporation placed an order for the first production-model stepper. The Virtual National Laboratory worked closely with representatives of an industry consortium whose members include Intel, Motorola, Advanced Micro Devices, Infineon, IBM, and Micron.
3. WARNING: EXPECT TIGHTER SECURITY BEGINNING
IN AUGUST
(Contact: JPTroutman@lbl.gov)
Berkeley Lab is under ever-increasing pressure from the DOE to improve its security measures. At the end of August 2003, gate security guards will be refusing entry to anyone who does not have either a valid badge or a gate pass. Therefore, the importance of communicating with the ALS User Services Office before you first arrive as a new user or when your badge has expired cannot be stressed enough.
Before arriving, new users without a badge must preregister via the ALS web site at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/quickguide/registration.html. They must also notify the ALS User Services Office (at alsuser@lbl.gov or 510-486-7745). Users with an expired badge need only notify the User Services Office before arriving.
New users planning to arrive on a weekend, when there are fewer people available to vouch for your identity, must notify the User Services Office by 4 P.M. the preceding Friday so that the control room can be notified. Do not assume access is automatic! Otherwise, the guards at the gate will be obligated to turn you away.
Users with citizenship in a country that the United States government has designated as a state sponsor of terrorism (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, Sudan) must notify the ALS User Services Office AT LEAST 90 days in advance.
The easiest way to communicate with the User Services Office is by sending an email to alsuser@lbl.gov or calling 510-486-7745. By following these procedures, the ALS will be able to ensure efficient access to the Lab for our users.
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.
Beamline 1.4.3
John Bradley (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Hoi-Ying Holman (Berkeley Lab)
Beamline 4.0.2
Stefan Maat (IBM Almaden Research Center)
Steve Cramer (Univ. of California, Davis, and Berkeley Lab)
Beamlines 5.0.1, 5.0.2, 5.0.3
Kevin Parris (Wyeth-Ayerst Research)
Dong Hae Shin, Vaheh Oganesyan, Jinyu Liu (Berkeley Lab)
Steve Holbrook, Libby Holbrook, Wasantha Ranatunga, Jana Mooseter,
Claudia Kliemann (Berkeley Lab)
Alexei Kazantsev (Univ. of Colorado at Boulder)
Mark Knapp, Armando Villasenor (Roche Bioscience)
Gyorgy Snell (Syrrx, Inc.)
Thomas Poulos (Univ. of California, Irvine)
Steven Jordan (Amgen)
Marc Jacobs (Vertex Pharmaceuticals)
Li-Wei Hung (Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Manal Swairjo (The Scripps Research Institute)
Xiayang Qiu (Pfizer Global Research and Development)
Ashley Deacon (Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory)
Richard Brennan (Oregon Health & Sciences University)
Beamline 7.0.1
M. Zahid Hasan (Princeton Univ.)
Laurent Duda (Uppsala Univ., Sweden)
Beamline 7.3.1.1
Z.Q. Qiu (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Mikhail Zharnikov (Univ. of Heidelberg, Germany)
Beamline 7.3.3
Eric Stach (Berkeley Lab)
Monica Barney (Berkeley Lab)
Beamline 8.0.1
David Ederer (Tulane Univ.)
Beamlines 8.2.1, 8.2.2
Axel Brunger (Stanford Univ.)
Christopher Garcia (Stanford Univ.)
Greg Bowman (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Duilio Cascio (Univ. of California, Los Angeles)
Jennifer Doudna (Univ. of California, Berkeley, and Berkeley Lab)
Joseph Mougous (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Beamline 8.3.1
Joel Credle, Earl Rutenber (Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Peter Hwang (Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Weiru Wang, Graeme Card (Plexxikon, Inc.)
Xiaomin Chen, Zhiyong Ren, Xiang Mao (Univ. of Texas)
David Akey, Jan Erzberger, Jacob Corn (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Sibyl Baladi (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Ho-Leung Ng (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Peter Beernik (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Matt Good (Univeristy of California, Berkeley)
Magnar Bjoras (The Scripps Research Institute)
Eugene Hur (University of California, San Francisco)
Pan Hu (Univeristy of California, San Francisco)
Jamie Cate (Berkeley Lab)
Beamline 9.0.1
Terrill Cool (Cornell Univ.)
Beamline 9.0.2
Steve Kevan (Univ. of Oregon)
Beamline 9.3.2
Frank Ogletree (Berkeley Lab)
Phil Ross (Berkeley Lab)
Beamline 10.0.1
Duane Jaecks (Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Z.X. Shen (Stanford Univ.)
Beamline 10.3.2
Michael Kersten (Johannes Gutenberg Univ., Germany)
The next issue of ALSNews will be published on August 6.
6. OPERATIONS UPDATE
(Contact: Lampo@lbl.gov)
For the user run of June 24 - July 2, the beam reliability (time delivered/time scheduled) was 95%. Of the scheduled beam, 91% 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/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
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.