The Advanced Photon Source is holding a virtual town hall for users interested in the project to construct the Advanced Spectroscopy and LERIX (ASL) beamline at 25-ID. The town hall began at 10:00 a.m. CDT today, Wednesday, September 1, 2021.

The APS/IIT 2021 XAFS Virtual Summer School was successfully held Aug 1-4 2021 online. This was a joint effort of IIT and the Advanced Photon Source and beamline staff.  More than a dozen people from ANL and IIT served as synchronous instructors, including Steve Heald, Matt Newville, Shelly Kelly, and other beamline scientists from the APS, and Grant Bunker, Carlo Segre, and Jeff Terry from IIT Physics Department. 

The 1,000th magnet for the Advanced Photon Source Upgrade has arrived at Argonne.  The 1,000th magnet is an eight-pole fast corrector magnet, which is used to alter the trajectory of the electron beam as it circulates around the storage ring at nearly the speed of light.

A feature story on the Argonne home page notes that "For more than 25 years, the Advanced Photon Source’s intense X-rays have enabled important breakthroughs. With a massive upgrade in the works, scientists will be able to see things at scale never seen before." The article provides a comprehensive look at the APS past, present, and future, including the role APS users played in the fight against COVID-19.

The call is now open for FY2023 applications for both the Maria Goeppert Mayer and Walter Massey fellowships.

In an interview with the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), APS user Stuart Stock (Northwestern University) discusses how x-ray diffraction reveals details of mummified remains.

To hear Xianbo Shi tell it, there is no substitute for on-the-job training in the field of X-ray optics. There is no particular educational track, he says, that will teach you how to design the complex series of synchrotron beamline optics (mirrors, lenses, monochromators, etc.) that manipulate powerful X-ray beams for scientific purposes. If you want to learn, you have to put down the books and go work at an X-ray facility.

As part of the recent APS/CNM Users Meeting, the APS Upgrade project hosted a question-and-answer session to address user questions about the timing and scope of the upgrade, and the benefits of the new storage ring and beamlines. Chief Project Officer Jim Kerby was joined by Jonathan Lang, X-ray Science Division Director, and Susan White De Pace, manager of the APS user programs. A document of frequently asked questions, including those asked at the Q&A session, has been compiled.

From Fox 32 News Chicago: Happy Birthday to a local lab that has been helping solve the world's problems for decades! Argonne National Laboratory is turning 75. Technology at the Lemont lab helps scientists at Argonne National Laboratory see tiny things to make huge discoveries. "The smaller the thing that you look at, the bigger the facility, so the APS is huge. You can fit Wrigley Field in the center of our electronic storage ring," said Stephen Streiffer, the Deputy Laboratory Director for Science and Technology.

Jan Ilavsky, physicist and beamline scientist with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Photon Source, has been named a Fellow of the American Crystallographic Association. Ilavsky is one of seven scientists named to the ACA Fellows class of 2021.

Work by Richard Prum (Yale University), Vinod Saranathan of Yale-NUS College at the National University of Singapore, and others in recent years has made progress on understanding how some birds produce the structural colors behind their brilliant blue plumage: a process of phase separation.

Scientists are preparing for a possible next coronavirus pandemic to strike. In future-looking research, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine scientists have identified a novel target for a drug to treat SARS-CoV-2 that also could impact a new emerging coronavirus. The study provides critical information that could aid drug development against future coronaviruses as well as SARS-CoV-2. Data was collected at the Life Sciences Collaborative Access Team at the Advanced Photon Source.

Shelly Kelly is assuming leadership of the X-ray Science Division Spectroscopy Group.

Could new treatments for hospitalized COVID-19 patients emerge from San Antonio? Scientists at four local [San Antonio] research institutions have laid the groundwork for such discoveries with a study [carried out at the APS] that showed how coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-2 can hide in the body and circumvent our immune defenses.

Si Chen, a physicist with the X-ray Science Division Microscopy Group at Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source, is one of six Argonne researchers who have received FY 2021 U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Program awards.

The APS Upgrade Project includes the construction of nine new feature beamlines with world-leading capabilities, and Dana Capatina is one of the lead engineers designing them. Her job is to develop safe, versatile delivery systems for x-ray beams, so that scientists coming to the APS to conduct research can make the best use of them.

Randall (Randy) E. Winans has been named the winner of the American Chemical Society’s 2020 R. A. Glenn Award presented for the most innovative and interesting paper presented at each ACS national meeting in the Energy and Fuels Division.

The APS User Organization Steering Committee is happy to announce the four new steering committee members along with the new student member! All five were nominated and elected by the APS user community.

The only way to really learn what happens at the extremes is to go to the extremes. For adventuresome types, such as extreme athletes and explorers, that means scaling forbidding mountains, diving to unimaginable ocean depths, or pushing vehicles to ever greater speeds, at great expense and even greater danger… "If you want the most extreme thermophysical conditions in the laboratory, the only game in town is shockwave compression," says Washington State University condensed matter physicist Yogendra Gupta, principal investigator at the Dynamic Compression Sector of the Advanced Photon Source…

The 2021 "Gopal K. Shenoy Award for Excellence in Beamline Science at the Advanced Photon Source" (APS) has been awarded to Jiyong Zhao, a physicist in the X-ray Science Division Inelastic X-ray and Nuclear Resonant Scattering Group at the U.S. Department of Energy’s APS at Argonne National Laboratory.