We’ve seen a lot of milestones since the removal and installation phase of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) Upgrade project began earlier this year. Here’s another big one: We’re now more than halfway through the shutdown, and we remain on schedule to deliver the Upgrade.

The original APS ended its long and storied run on April 17, powering down its beamlines and turning off its accelerator complex, and since then our team has been steadily working to bring the upgraded APS to life. We’ve made great progress in seven months, as the entire team has worked safely to complete the project. We now have more than 180 of the required 200 magnet modules in place in the accelerator tunnel, with over half of the 40 sectors fully installed and being prepared for final test and checkout. Just last month we began baking out sectors of the new storage ring, a process that reduces outgassing in vacuum chambers.

One of the biggest recent success stories has been the restart of the Linear Accelerator (Linac) and the Particle Accumulator Ring (PAR). These smaller accelerators are the start of our chain – electrons begin their journey in the Linac, get bunched together in the PAR and then get injected into the booster ring, which will then kick them up to 6 GeV, the storage ring stored beam energy. Bringing the Linac and PAR back online took a lot of effort from a dedicated team, and many congratulations are in order. This is a vitally important first step toward restarting the entire APS complex. View a before and after video of the APS storage ring tunnel. 

On the experiment floor, work across the range of beamlines at the APS continues to accelerate. Enclosures for both new stations in the Long Beamline Building – the High-Energy X-ray Microscope (HEXM) at 20-ID and the In Situ Nanoprobe (ISN) at 19-ID – are in place. New components have been installed for the X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS) beamline at 8-ID, and teams are starting work on the Polarization Modulation Spectroscopy (POLAR) beamline at 4-ID.

But if you want the big beamline story of the month, it was undoubtedly the arrival and installation of the Grand Tube. This enclosure is part of the Coherent Surface Scattering Imaging (CSSI) beamline at 9-ID. View the video to see why it’s called the Grand Tube and see the assembly of the Grand Tube at Beamline 9-ID.

With all this progress, I think it’s important to acknowledge again what a phenomenal machine the original APS was for nearly 30 years. With that in mind, we are particularly proud that a major portion of the APS storage ring will find a new home and a new scientific purpose in the Electron-Ion Collider, under construction at Brookhaven National Laboratory. It’s great to know that even as the APS looks to the future, its legacy will live on.

As always, check the APS Upgrade website for the latest. Here's to a great first half of the shutdown and a productive and safe second half.

Be well,
Jim Kerby
Director, APS Upgrade Project