2022 User Meeting Workshops & Tutorials

This tutorial is tailored for students and postdocs, including those who have no prior exposure to synchrotron experiments. It provides a broad introductory overview of the science one can perform at the ALS with an emphasis on some of the experimental techniques, from photoemission and spectroscopy to scattering and imaging. Each topic will include a general introduction to the technique(s) and examples of applications highlighting the capabilities of the ALS beamlines. There will also be content related to the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscale research facility located steps away from the ALS at LBNL, which enables synergistic research in a single trip.

Anyone can perform experiments at the ALS for free, and access to this facility is through a beamtime proposal process. As such, there will be a session about how to become a user of the ALS and obtain beamtime, including guidance about how to write a proposal and how proposals are evaluated.

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! Students with no/limited prior synchrotron experience are particularly encouraged to attend.

In advance of the tutorial, participants can submit data sets that they have collected. From the submissions, we will select approximately five user data sets to highlight during the tutorial session. For these, we will harness the expertise of ALS and LBNL computational science, computer vision, machine learning, and tomography experts to show how the data could be processed, analyzed, and visualized at a level above and beyond the “standard” approaches that are most often used by users at microCT beamlines.

The upgrade of the Advanced Light Source will require new instrumentation to take advantage of the hundredfold increase in brightness, as well as advanced alignment techniques, aided by advanced feedback from diagnostics and wavefront sensors. Please join to discuss your needs as a user and learn about the latest developments.

Increasing challenges impacting technology and therefore society, including increased power consumption and heat dissipation of modern electronics, and the demand for sustainable and environmentally friendly energy generation and products as well as new concepts in medical treatments, lead to the investigation of a plethora of multi-element material systems, with increasing focus on modern, layered, two-dimensional, or e.g., biologically created materials. The comprehensive understanding of these materials demands the ability for spatially resolved characterization as well as the ability to track chemical and magnetic processes in real time on relevant time scales. This includes, e.g., the monitoring of synthesis processes or magnetization dynamics. Scanning transmission x-ray microscopy (STXM) allows the element-specific and spatially resolved (≥ 18 nm) chemical and magnetic (XMCD) characterization of such materials over a wide range of x-ray absorption energies. Time-resolved STXM (TR-STXM) allows us to monitor dynamic excitations of chemical and magnetic processes. The workshop will introduce STXM, XMCD, and the sum rules, with the focus on time-resolved STXM and its application to element-specific detection of chemical and magnetization dynamics on the micro- and nanometer scale.

Soft x-ray scattering can probe from atomic to microstructural properties where tuning to a resonance and variable polarization gives additional sensitivity to magnetic and electronic scattering as well as element-specific information. Coherent beams offer an even finer probe to the disorder and dynamics within these complex orders. The COSMIC scattering branch, Beamline 7.0.1.1, is about to open to general users and its coherence program will transition to FLEXON, one ALS-U’s flagship beamlines. Therefore, the workshop is timely in identifying the most interesting quantum phenomena which can be probed using this powerful tool. Some examples of those are charge and orbital ordering, antiferromagnetism, two-dimensional materials, non-collinear magnetic topological textures, and high temperature superconductivity. We hope to elicit interest from the community to inform the building up of the user program and instrumentation development to enable the progress of research in these and other areas.

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.

Modern soft x-ray RIXS (resonant inelastic x-ray scattering) has evolved into a new era beyond just improvements on energy resolution. Recent demonstrations have shown that it is possible to greatly improve different technical parameters of RIXS techniques to another level, e.g., spatial and time resolutions, through innovations in the optical systems of grating-based RIXS. This workshop + tutorial will introduce general concepts and recent advances in RIXS systems at the ALS, followed by scientific discussions in studying highly correlated physics and material sciences for energy applications. Additionally, realizing and utilizing the full potential of soft x-ray RIXS into new domains of sciences will naturally trigger the needs and opportunities in machine-learning-based discoveries and understanding, so we also plan to cover some of the relevant topics on big data from high-throughput soft x-ray spectroscopy in the presentations and discussions of this workshop + tutorial.

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 spin-resolved ARPES for 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, with particular focus on the recent development in momentum microscopy with spin resolution.

Multigrain x-ray diffraction (MXD) bridges the gap between powder x-ray diffraction (PXD) and single-crystal x-ray diffraction (SXD). It is crucial for many in situ x-ray diffraction experiments where ever-shrinking diffraction volumes impose restrictions on the interpretation of PXD or SXD data. The difficulty of making MXD a widely applicable tool is the lack of off-the-shelf analysis software. This workshop will give an introduction to the MXD technique as well as provide tutorials for data reduction and analysis software developed in-house in collaboration with LLNL.

Soft materials and their interfaces are ubiquitous in everyday life. Moreover, an improved fundamental understanding of complex interfaces is essential to developing new energy and environmental technologies, and these interfaces are often composed of soft materials. Understanding the connection between the molecular structure and interfacial behavior will drive efficient design of membranes for energy devices and water treatment, medical implants, and other applications. Synchrotron x-ray characterization has enabled probing morphology and dynamics of interfaces in soft materials. The proposed highly focused and coherent beam of the upgraded ALS will further advance this field. This workshop will highlight recent developments in probing soft interfaces, application of new techniques, the existing challenges, and future opportunities. Through diverse speakers, including graduate students, postdocs, and senior researchers, this workshop will cover the contributions of and possibilities for synchrotron techniques to advance the understanding of soft material interfaces.