Daniel Chemla
steps down
as ALS director
 Daniel
Chemla, who in his 15 years of senior management at Berkeley
Lab transformed the ALS into a major international research
center, will step down from his division director position.
In a memo
to ALS staff, Berkeley Lab Director Steve Chu cited Daniel's
"visionary" and innovative work in materials sciences,
nanoscience, and synchrotron source science. "I am in
awe of his record and grateful for his legacy," Chu stated.
Daniel came to Berkeley from Bell Labs in 1990 to head the
Materials Sciences Division. In 1998, he also took on the
role of ALS division director and continued to serve as director
of the two large divisions for four years. In this dual role,
he was instrumental in bringing the Molecular Foundry to Berkeley
Lab as part of the Department of Energy's Nanosciences Initiative.
As ALS director, Daniel oversaw the groundbreaking installation
of superbends in the storage ring and the realization of a
five-year strategic plan for building out the straight sections
with a full complement of insertion-device beamlines. The
six years of Daniel's tenure saw a tripling in both the number
of beamlines and the number of users at the ALS. Plans are
currently underway for a celebration in honor of Daniel to
be held later this year. Acting ALS Division Director Janos
Kirz will continue to head the facility until a nationwide
search, led by Associate Laboratory Director for Physical
Sciences Paul Alivisatos, concludes.
Photoexcitation
of a volume
plasmon in buckyballs
For molecules made from a single element,
buckyballs (carbon-60) are very large. They mark the transition
from atoms to solids. In atoms and small molecules, the behavior
of electrons is accounted individually; in bulk materials,
a sea of innumerable electrons behaves en masse, yielding
a very different description of electronic structure. Buckyballs
perch on the cusp between these states, as evidenced by the
discovery in the early 1990s that, when subject to excitation
energy of about 22 eV, the four valence electrons belonging
to each of the 60 carbon atoms in a buckyball, 240 in all,
act collectively, resulting in a "surface plasmon."
This collective motion is a back-and-forth oscillation of
the whole cloud of valence electrons, relative to the effectively
rigid cage of carbon cores. Now, the latest results from a
U.S.–German collaboration on the electronic structure
of photoexcited buckyball ions show an additional resonance
near 40 eV, characterized as a volume plasmon made possible
by the special fullerene geometry. Full
story.
Publication about this research: S.W.J.
Scully, E.D. Emmons, M.F. Gharaibeh, R.A. Phaneuf, A.L.D.
Kilcoyne, A.S. Schlachter, S. Schippers, A. Mueller, H.S.
Chakraborty, M.E. Madjet, and J.M. Rost, "Photoexcitation
of a Volume Plasmon in C60 Ions," Phys. Rev. Lett.
94, 065503 (2005).
Contact: Ron Phaneuf, phaneuf@unr.edu
New zone plate
for soft x-ray microscopy
at 15-nm spatial resolution
Analytical tools that combine spatial
resolution with elemental and chemical identification at the
nanometer scale along with large penetration depth are indispensable
for the life and physical sciences. The XM-1 soft x-ray microscope
at the ALS produces images that not only reveal structures
but can identify their chemical elements and measure magnetic
and other properties as well. Now a new method for creating
optical devices with nanoscale accuracy has allowed researchers
in Berkeley Lab's Center for X-Ray Optics, which built and
operates the XM-1, to achieve an extraordinary resolution
of better than 15 nm, with the promise of even higher resolution
in the near future. Full
story.
Publication about this research: W. Chao,
B.D. Harteneck, J.A. Liddle, E.H. Anderson, and D.T. Attwood,
"Soft x-ray microscopy at a resolution better than 15
nm," Nature 435, 1210 (2005).
Contact: Weilun Chao, WLChao@lbl.gov
Weilun Chao receives
Werner Meyer-Ilse Memorial Award
 Weilun
Chao of Berkeley Lab's Center for X-Ray Optics (CXRO) has
been honored with the Werner Meyer-Ilse Memorial Award for
Excellence in X-Ray Microscopy. The award was announced at
the 2005 International X-Ray Microscopy meeting, held last
month in Himeji, Japan. An international selection committee
confers the award during the triennial meeting to a young
scientist whose work over the preceding three years represents
an outstanding contribution to the development of x-ray microscopy
through either technical advances or applications. The award
was established in honor of Werner Meyer-Ilse, who built and
led the x-ray microscopy program at Beamline 6.1.2 and served
as chair of the ALS Users' Executive Committee in 1998.
Weilun Chao received his B.S. degree
in physics and B.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from
Stony Brook University in 1999. He then entered the graduate
program of UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Sciences and joined David Attwood's group at
CXRO the same year, working toward the quantification and
enhancement of the optical performance of soft x-ray zone-plate
microscopy. Recently, he and his colleagues developed a new
zone-plate nanofabrication technique, enabling the achievement
of sub-15-nm spatial resolution at the XM-1 microscope at
Beamline 6.1.2, a significant breakthrough that was published
in Nature (see item above). Weilun obtained his Ph.D. degree
earlier this year and plans to remain in CXRO to extend the
new fabrication technique to even higher-resolution optics
and other zone-plate designs.
Secretary of
Energy
Samuel Bodman visits ALS
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary
Samuel Bodman visited Berkeley Lab on August 4 as part of
a regional tour of Bay Area Labs. The visit included a stop
at the ALS, where Acting ALS Division Director Janos Kirz
described the facility's general organization. As the tour
group walked over the top of the storage ring, the Secretary
noted the magnet yoke left over from Lawrence's cyclotron,
and Ray Orbach (Director, DOE Office of Science) pointed out
the beamlines emanating from the bending magnets and undulators.
The Secretary also visited the new PEEM-3 beamline (11.0.1),
viewed displays about correlated-electron studies using angle-resolved
photoelectron spectroscopy, and listened to a description
of the femtosecond slicing project. He was also interested
in hearing about the planned top-off upgrade that will lead
to higher brightness and an effectively constant beam current.
Physical Biosciences Division members Carolyn Larabell and
Paul Adams talked about projects involving tomography and
macromolecular crystallography, respectively.
Secretary Bodman (center) at the Molecular
Foundry construction site with (L-R) Steve Chu,
M.R.C. Greenwood, Paul Alivisatos, and Jim Krupnick.
Accompanying Bodman and Orbach were Aundra
Richards (Manager, DOE Berkeley Site Office), M.R.C. Greenwood
(UC Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs),
Robert Foley (UC Vice President for Laboratory Management),
Berkeley Lab Director Steve Chu and Deputy Director Graham
Fleming, and a small host of others. In addition to touring
the ALS, Secretary Bodman visited the Molecular Foundry construction
site and the National Center for Electron Microscopy and heard
presentations on the Supernova Acceleration Probe and computer
visualization. During his comments at an all-hands meeting
that preceded the tour, the Secretary emphasized his personal
commitment to safety and the need to pay continuing attention
to this aspect of all operations. Read
more.
Governor Schwarzenegger
holds
press conference at ALS
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
made his first official visit to Berkeley Lab this month,
taking a brief tour of the ALS before holding a press conference
outdoors with the ALS dome as a backdrop. The Governor was
accompanied by Lab Director Steve Chu, UC President Robert
Dynes, and UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, all of
whom also gave brief remarks at the press conference, which
emphasized the importance of scientific research to the California
economy. The Governor's hour-long visit included discussions
with UC and Lab officials in the ALS conference room and a
walking tour over the storage ring.
L-R: Governor Schwarzenegger tours
the ALS with Chu,
Birgeneau, Dynes, and Bruce Darling, UC Senior
Vice President for University Affairs.
Paul Adams (Physical Biosciences Division)
was on hand to brief the Governor at the protein crystallography
beamlines and showed how solving protein structures is of
great importance to the development of new drugs. Paul Alivisatos
(Associate Laboratory Director for Physical Sciences) talked
about the wonders of nanotechnology and gave a demonstration
of multihued fluorescence from quantum dots suspended in fluid.
In his remarks at the press conference, Schwarzenegger praised
the work done at the ALS and throughout Berkeley Lab as "absolutely
incredible" and urged the DOE to renew the UC contracts,
currently up for bid, for Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos
National Laboratories.
Read more: Today
at Berkeley Lab; UC
Berkeley News.
2005 ALS Users'
Meeting Update
 General
information, meeting deadlines, and online registration for
this year's ALS Users' Meeting, to be held at Berkeley Lab
October 20–22, is available on the meeting Web
site. The early registration deadline is Saturday, October
1. Information about accommodations
for meeting participants in local hotels is available on the
Web. The deadline for abstract submissions for poster presentations,
including submissions for the student poster competition,
is Friday, September 30. Instructions for submitting
abstracts can be found online. This year, eleven workshops
will follow the end of the formal meeting program on Friday
and Saturday, October 21–22. Workshop topics are listed
below, with links to further information, if available.
Forefront
AMO Science: Clusters, Ions, Dressed States...
Frontiers
of Synchrotron-Based X-Ray Microdiffraction
Macromolecular Crystallography I: Advanced
Experimental Techniques for Getting the Best Data from Difficult
Samples
Macromolecular
Crystallography II: New Strategies for Data Processing with
Automated Software Tools
New
Visions in Bandmapping
Novel
Approaches to Soft X-Ray Spectroscopy: Scanning Transmission
X-Ray Microscopy and Ambient-Pressure X-Ray Photoelectron
Spectroscopy
Soft
and Hard X-Ray Tomography at the ALS
Soft
X-Ray Photon-In and Photon-Out Spectroscopy: New Frontiers
THz
Science and Technology Network: Opportunities and Organization
Ultrafast
X-Ray Science at the ALS
XANES and EXAFS Spectroscopy of Materials
and Biological Samples: Expanding the Range of Applications
at Beamline 9.3.1
Contact: alsum@lbl.gov
Workshop: Soft
X-Ray Scattering
from Nanostructured Matter
A workshop on soft x-ray scattering from
hard and soft nanostructured matter, co-sponsored by the Molecular
Foundry and the ALS, is being held on Friday, September 30,
at Berkeley Lab. Resonant soft x-ray scattering has emerged
as a powerful tool for studying nanometer-scale structure
and functionality in a broad range of magnetic and other hard
condensed-matter systems and is emerging with unique capabilities
to study compositional heterogeneity in soft matter. These
capabilities result primarily from the sharp core resonances
of many elements in the 250- to 2500-eV range, whose high
sensitivity to bonding and spin-resolved electronic structure
means that heterogeneity in these properties yields strong
contrast in scattering measurements with spatial resolution
down to half a wavelength. Such sensitivity to chemical and
functional structural organization will be valuable to research
projects at the Molecular Foundry as well as to the broader
scientific community, and yet instrumentation to fully exploit
these capabilities is lacking. This workshop will develop
the scientific case for a dedicated undulator-based soft x-ray
scattering facility at the ALS to study structural organization
in a broad range of nanostructured matter.
Topics to be discussed include
- Opportunities in hard condensed
matter
- Early results and opportunities
in soft condensed matter
- Coordination with Molecular Foundry
needs
- Optimized instrumentation and sample
environments
- Complementary microscopy and coherent
scattering approaches
Preliminary speakers include
- Sunil Sinha (UC San Diego and Los
Alamos National Laboratory)
- Eric Fullerton (Hitachi Global
Storage Technologies)
- Gary Mitchell (Dow Chemical Company)
- Nitash Balsara (UC Berkeley and
Berkeley Lab)
For more information, contact one of
the workshop's co-organizers:
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