Siegfried S. Hecker regales the audience with stories from his visits to North Korea, working with plutonium.

A record 461 people registered for the 2011 ALS User Meeting, packing the plenary sessions, workshops, and meals. Berkeley Lab Deputy Director Horst Simon welcomed guests to the meeting, touching on the ominous challenge of data storage and processing. ALS Director Roger Falcone gave an in-depth overview of ALS progress and prospects, highlighting the new AMBER beamline, the controls upgrade, and a new user processing system as the top three priorities for the coming year.

DOE Associate Director of Science for Basic Energy Sciences Dr. Harriet Kung spoke about supporting use-inspired science and shortening innovation paths. She also introduced the Materials Genome Initiative, a new White House initiative meant to "speed our understanding of the fundamentals of material science." The morning continued with an engaging talk by Siegfried S. Hecker, former director of LANL, who shared personal stories about his visits to North Korea to assess their plutonium program. Richard Muller of UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab challenged the audience to turn a skeptic scientific eye toward the data for and against climate change. Mary McGrath ended the morning session with a perspective on how Gilead Sciences uses protein crystallography to improve drug candidates for HIV treatment. Tom Wallow (Globalfoundries) added another industry perspective, showcasing ALS beamlines and scientists that are improving semiconductor lithography, advancing materials and processes for future microchip fabrication.

Oleg Chubar (BNL) presents a talk about numerical modeling of beamline performance at a workshop dedicated to LUXOR, the Light Source Upgrade of X-ray Optics for Research.

ALS staff updates included User Services group lead Sue Bailey discussing the proposed user processing system, which will automatically link training and access at the ALS. She continued this discussion with users during the open forum, also touching on new options for the ALS proposal cycle and rapid access. Falcone asked for input on the proposed LUXOR project (Light Source Upgrade of X-ray Optics for Research), citing increases in three areas as the motivation for LUXOR: demand for higher-brightness beam, throughput due to increased robotics use, and operations efficiency due to increasing numbers of remote users. Howard Padmore’s Experimental Systems Group update also focused on LUXOR, which, if funded, would improve the optics in existing Basic Energy Sciences beamlines, hopefully achieving order-of-magnitude increases in performance. He also reviewed the operation of ESG’s 11 beamlines and discussed the opportunities for advanced computing and computational physics. Jim Floyd followed with an overview of ALS Safety.

Prior to the second annual student poster slam, Tony McDaniel of Sandia Labs described how soft x-rays are advancing electrochemical devices by illuminating information on their surface and bulk states and their mechanical operation. During the student poster slam, 21 students each gave a 50-second introduction to their poster. Students came from as far as Germany, Thailand, Sweden, and South Korea, and again this year several students from the University of Saskatchewan participated. One student thought a cartoon slide might garner an edge, but first place ultimately went to Alice England of UC Berkeley for her poster "on the hydration and hydrolysis of carbon dioxide." Guests who braved the soggy weather could view all the posters at the poster session and reception that evening, where they also had the chance to vote for their favorite photograph of "The ALS at Work" in the ALS photography contest.

Tuesday was an exciting day at Berkeley Lab, as Saul Perlmutter won the Nobel Prize in Physics early in the day. ALS User Meeting sessions moved from the auditorium into the User Support Building to accommodate a press conference for Perlmutter, and the second day of plenary sessions began with a bit of excitement in the air.

Student Poster Award winner Alice England (in purple) presents her work during the student poster slam.

Subrata Chakraborty, winner of this year's David A. Shirley Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement at the ALS, opened the second day's sessions with a funny and engaging presentation of his work. He won the award for "designing and executing the most important and difficult experiment relevant to understanding the origin and evolution of the solar system," measuring the isotope ratios of oxygen in different parts of the solar system. England followed, clearly illustrating the work that won her the Student Poster Award.

Invited science highlight talks began with David Esteves from the University of Colorado, Boulder, touting the potential importance trapping atoms in carbon cages could have on the future of medicine. The recent observation of confinement resonances in endohedral fullerenes confirmed their long-hypothesized existence, adding a wealth of information to this growing field. Brian Collins of North Carolina State University demonstrated the benefits of using soft x-ray scattering to gain insight into organic devices like solar cells.

Eli Dart followed, bringing full circle what Horst Simon touched on at the beginning of the meeting, that data processing and storage are fast becoming the bottleneck in scientific research. Dart presented the Energy Sciences Network, or ESNet: a dedicated DOE network that can be optimized to fit the needs of a specific project, lab, or facility with the goal of advancing science. ESNet is looking for early adopters interested in moving data.

With more registrants than ever before, the ALS patio was packed for the awards banquet, which was especially colorful this year thanks to the decorative efforts of a new caterer. After thanking this year's meeting co-chairs Gyorgy Snell and Jeffrey Kortright, UEC chair David Osborn went on to give the Klaus Halbach Award for Innovative Instrumentation at the ALS to Yi-De Chuang for "world-leading achievements that have revolutionized conventional soft x-ray scattering instrumentation and enabled the first time-resolved resonant scattering experiment at the Linac Coherent Light Source."

Ed Domning and Brian Smith received the Tim Renner User Services Award for Outstanding Support to the ALS User Community for "creating solutions using LabView that enable users to automate experimental endstations and synchronize them with accelerator operations."

You can read more about this year's award recipients here. A complete agenda, including a list of this year's 13 workshops, is also online.

2011 ALS Award Recipients