2021 User Meeting Workshops & Tutorials

This tutorial is tailored for students, postdocs, and anyone who wants to know how to take advantage of everything the ALS has to offer to further their research. It provides a broad overview of the science one can perform at the ALS with an emphasis on photoemission (XPS, PES, ARPES), spectroscopy (XAS, XES, RIXS), scattering (RSXS, RSoXS, crystallography, XPCS), and imaging (STXM, PEEM, tomography). Each topic will include a general introduction to the technique(s) and examples of applications highlighting the capabilities of the ALS beamlines.

This year, our traditional session covering the logistic of the general user proposal system will be extended to include tips and best practices on how to successfully craft a scientific proposal, as well as a panel discussion with beamline scientists and reviewers to provide more guidance about how the process works behind the scenes.

This is the place to ask all the questions you have about a particular technique and how to successfully apply it to your scientific project!

Work to enable remote access at light sources has a long history and has been further catalyzed by the current pandemic. Over the past year, staff, robotics, and automated systems took over tasks from users, and more tools were deployed, enabling users to participate in and control experiments and analysis remotely. This has yielded a number of remote-access success stories. Overall, however, the pandemic has significantly decreased the total number of users served and the amount of beamtime scheduled. There has been an increased burden on light source staff as they have developed remote access capabilities while attempting to maintain productivity in challenging circumstances. And the careers of many—in particular early career scientists—have been impacted because of their reduced ability to be involved in experiments. This workshop will be a chance to hear about some success stories and new developments, but also a chance for users to give input to ALS staff on their vision for what remote access to light sources should look like in the future.

Coherent x-ray scattering can provide a unique fingerprint of the ordering in a sample. The natural Q separation from scattering gives a simultaneous multiscale measurement. Recent advances in modeling, detection technology, and computational algorithms are enabling more advanced ways to probe the true nature of dynamics and the degree of ordering on the nanoscale. At the ALS, the new COSMIC scattering beamline is being commissioned. The future FLEXON beamline arriving with the ALS Upgrade will see a significant boost in coherence, allowing studies of more “disordered” samples such as composite and amorphous material systems.

In this workshop, we hope to identify the scientific questions most apt for such a multiscale probe in the condensed matter setting. Spintronics, magneto-electric coupling, and layered magnetic 2D materials are just a few promising directions in which materials for future technologies might expand. The workshop will enable collaborations and facilitate a roadmap towards the further development of correlation methods in x-ray scattering at the ALS.

This tutorial/workshop will provide fundamentals on x-ray scattering (SAXS/WAXS, RSoXS) for material applications, focusing on soft materials such as polymers. Current state-of-the-art in situ capabilities (tensile, electrochemical cell, etc), advanced data analysis (GIWAXS, res-CDSAXS), as well as future directions (high throughput, multimodal, autonomous) will be discussed through representative scientific examples. The talks will be presented by a combination of talented graduate students, postdocs, and well-known scientists, covering essentials needed to fully utilize x-ray scattering to accelerate materials discovery from broad perspectives.

With the increasing computing power nowadays, DFT calculations are becoming popular. Coupling DFT calculations with XAS and RIXS results will not only help you with peak/feature assignments but will bring in more insights in the system you want to study. For those who are interested in running your own DFT calculations, but with little or no experience, we will teach you how to start from scratch to run your own DFT calculations, and correlate the DFT results with your XAS and RIXS experiments. We will also use a few simple, but insightful examples, to show what we can pull out from those calculations beyond simply reproducing your experimental results.

The 2021 12th annual SIBYLS BioSAXS workshop is designed for current and future SIBYLS SAXS users. We will provide participants with software tutorial sessions for biological SAXS. The latest advances in SAXS studies on biological systems will be discussed with particular focus on advances in our mail-in SAXS program and on advances in synchrotron scattering techniques, modeling of dynamic and flexible structures, bioSAXS with membrane protein, and integrating bioSAXS analysis within cryo-EM imaging and crystallography. SIBYLS Lab’s SAXS beamline scientists will introduce the future of high-throughput and size-exclusion coupled SAXS (HT-SAXS and SEC-SAXS). We will present talks about integrating high-resolution models in the SAXS modeling. Introductory crystallography will also be discussed. We will provide an opportunity for participants to present and discuss their projects with the SIBYLS staff. Interested users will present their case studies for workshop analysis. This will provide for a flux of ideas among workshop participants and inspire new perspectives for future data analysis.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are enabling important advances across a number of experimental techniques and scientific disciplines. In the morning session, we will have speakers highlighting interesting applications of machine learning in their work at the synchrotron. In the afternoon session, ALS staff, postdocs, and collaborators will show off some of their work to enable users to have easier access to machine learning, followed by breakout rooms with each of those speakers where users can ask detailed questions about how these new developments might apply to their work.

Critical minerals and materials, which include certain lanthanides, lithium, and a few other elements, have central roles in modern clean energy technologies. Current technologies to extract, separate, and recycle these elements are energy intensive, expensive, and generate large amounts of corrosive waste. The potential risk to supply of critical materials and urgent need to maintain U.S. leadership in this area has increased the urgency for innovative basic science that can support discovery of new critical materials technologies.

This workshop will focus on the following aspects to bridge the science and technology gaps in domestic critical materials research: instrumentation, synthesis, characterization, and theory. An additional emphasis is placed on the actinide elements, which are 5f-electron compatriots of the 4f-electron lanthanides. Through this workshop, we intend to establish a research team task force among the experts in the LBNL divisions and outreach to other institutions to establish a focused research program that can take advantage of the unique opportunities at the future LBNL Charter Hill site and help maintain the leading role of the U.S. in critical materials, minerals, and f-electron science.

Strain is an important factor for the electronic system in a material. There are numerous ways to employ static and dynamic strain to modulate electronic and magnetic properties of materials. In this cross-cutting workshop we will discuss how questions around strain are addressed across the Quantum Materials Research and Discovery Thrust Area at the ALS, using a diverse set of tools and approaches.

With continuing development in light source, detector, cryogenics, and in situ sample control, the boundary of science that can be explored by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) is rapidly expanding. This workshop aims to cover the recent development in high-resolution, low-temperature ARPES and spin-resolved ARPES for the studies of quantum materials. The scientific cases enabled by the new progress in instrumentation will be discussed in connection with the Beamline 4.0.3 upgrade.

This workshop will discuss pushing the limits of nanoARPES to the “ultimate” to approach 10 nm in spatial resolution. This would open a new frontier for understanding electronic structure at the length scales where exotic properties emerge and expand the applications of ARPES to a wide array of samples, physics, and communities. Particularly rewarding applications could include topological edge and anomalous quantum Hall states, states formed at lateral interfaces and heterostructures, and directly attacking classical problems such as defect-induced gap fluctuations in high T_c cuprates and other systems defined by electronic inhomogeneity. We will also discuss the exciting possibility of fully coherent ARPES that will be reached when both the incident phonons and excited electronic states are fully coherent across the probe beam. Join the discussion of the potential impact of “ultimate” nanoARPES.