The year-long storage ring installation and commissioning period for the Advanced Photon Source Upgrade Project is now scheduled to begin April 17, 2023. During this time, the APS will pause all user operations.
This newly confirmed date is a delay of 10 months later than the originally scheduled start of the installation period and is the result of impacts associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Project leaders have been closely monitoring the effect of the pandemic on vendor deliveries and on-site assembly work, and recently made the decision, with concurrence from APS operations management, Argonne leadership, and DOE, to reschedule the start of the downtime.
Delaying the shutdown period allows the APS to continue operating for all three user runs in 2022. There will also be an operations run in the early months of 2023, and the exact schedule is to be determined.
The APS Upgrade Project will see the facility’s existing electron storage ring replaced with a newly built state-of-the-art model, which will increase the brightness of the x-rays available to users by up to 500 times. The project will also include up to nine new feature beamlines – two of them housed in the Long Beamline Building, now under construction – and upgrades to 15 existing beamlines.
A schedule of construction work for new and existing beamlines is in the final stages of development and will be posted on the APS Upgrade web page when it is complete. Please bookmark the APS Upgrade web page and check back often.
The installation period and early commissioning are expected to take one year, after which the upgraded APS will be operational and accept proposals for research projects. More information for users is available at the Users Office website. We will provide regular updates on the project as it progresses.
The Advanced Photon Source is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
The U.S. Department of Energy's APS is one of the world’s most productive x-ray light source facilities. Each year, the APS provides high-brightness x-ray beams to a diverse community of more than 5,000 researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. Researchers using the APS produce over 2,000 publications each year detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other x-ray light source research facility. APS x-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC, for the U.S. DOE Office of Science.
The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit the Office of Science website.