Introduction
Welcome to our second annual Compendium of research abstracts and technical reports from the Advanced Light Source (ALS). Unlike last year's volume, which covered research conducted from the onset of ALS operations in 1993 through all of 1996, this year the Compendium covers just one year, 1997, yet the number of abstracts included is about the same (122 compared to 137 for 1993-96). The increase is easily explained by a steadily growing number of station-hours (the number of beamline stations times the hours of operation). This figure will surely continue to swell in coming years. We now have 16 beamlines in operation for users, and thanks in part to a boost from the Department of Energy (DOE) Scientific Facilities Initiative that began in 1996, there will be 11 more by the end of 1998. This augurs well for a larger and larger Compendium as new experimental facilities come to fill more and more of the ALS experimental floor.
The reports in this compendium show that we were already well on the way to achieving our goal of a robust scientific program at the ALS. The research summarized in the abstracts is both broad and deep, with topics distributed among such major scientific areas as complex materials, nanostructures/semiconductors, magnetic materials, environmental and earth sciences, polymers and soft matter, protein crystallography, biomicroscopy and spectroscopy, catalytic materials and surface science, atomic and molecular (AMO) physics, and chemical dynamics, as well as major technology development effort in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. These abstracts, then, constitute the latest snapshots in a growing family album that document our collaborative march with the user community toward a scientific program characterized by both excellence and scope.
A further expression of our scientific goals will appear in a report documenting forefront research ideas by top-notch scientists. As I write these words, we are hard at work on just this assignment. Many of you may have been among the 325 or so participants at our three-day workshop on Scientific Directions at the Advanced Light Source that was held at the Berkeley Lab from March 23-25, 1998, with Yves Petroff, Director-General of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, as the chair. With DOE and Berkeley Lab, we organized the workshop with the goals of formulating a vision for the ALS scientific program into the twenty-first century and of making recommendations that will result in a road map for the implementation of that program. A workshop report will compile the findings of breakout groups concentrating on specific areas of scientific research and will lay the groundwork for a new ALS roadmap.
In concert with this renewal of the scientific vision, the internal organization of the ALS has been restructured to emphasize our principal mission of providing the means for our users to do the very best science. The Experimental Systems Group, led by Howard Padmore, now reports to the ALS Scientific Program Head, namely, me. Also reporting to me are two new groups: the User Services Group led by Gary Krebs and the Scientific Support Group led by Zahid Hussain. [Note: In July 1998, this changed so that all three of the groups mentioned here report directly to the ALS Division Director. -- Editor] In the User Services Group, we have consolidated some of the functions that were previously dispersed throughout the ALS. We have given Gary and the User Services Group the mission of assisting users to come to the ALS and establish their experiments on the floor in a seamless and user-friendly fashion. The mission of Zahid and the Scientific Support Group is to provide, as requested, assistance to users in the execution and interpretation of their experiments. Gary and Zahid both have seats in the ALS group leaders "cabinet," which is resulting in a shift at the ALS to a greater emphasis on users and their science. We trust that these changes will be reflected in next year's Compendium, where we expect the abstracts and technical reports to be even more adventurous and innovative than those reported here!
Neville Smith
ALS Scientific Program Head