Members of the ALS Brightness Improvement Team have been recognized by the Department of Energy with a prestigious Secretary of Energy Achievement Award. This distinction follows the team’s receipt last December of a Berkeley Lab Director’s Award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.
The brightness improvement project primarily involved replacing about 50 corrector magnets with an equal number of combined-function magnets (sextupoles that serve as corrector dipoles, skew quadrupoles, and sextupoles), amounting to major surgery on the storage ring. The four-year, $5.8M project was the largest upgrade of the ALS storage ring in its more than 20-year history, eclipsing superbends in 2001 and top-off injection in 2009. The brightness upgrade was completed under budget and months ahead of schedule, with no “teething period.”
As noted in the team’s nomination: “The truly exceptional aspect of this achievement is the way it worked right out of the box. Synchrotrons are sophisticated devices and it was expected that there would be significant time lapse of many months to transition to the higher brightness. However, everything worked immediately, outperforming all expectations.”
The improvement solidified the ALS’s place as one of the world’s brightest sources of soft x-rays. It reduced the horizontal emittance of the electron beam from 6.3 nm to 2.0 nm (Small Spot, Brighter Beam), delivering to users a three-fold improvement in photon-beam brightness in bend-magnet beamlines and a two-fold improvement in insertion-device beamlines (with existing undulators; greater improvement will be achieved with future insertion devices).
Congratulations to the team members!
- Barry J. Bailey
- H. Ken Berg
- Alan K. Biocca
- Alan Black
- Patrick W. Casey
- Dan H. Colomb
- Robert F. Gunion
- Nanyang Li
- J. Steve Marks
- Arnaud Madur
- Hiroshi Nishimura
- G. Chris Pappas
- Karl V. Petermann
- Gregory J. Portmann
- Soren O. Prestemon
- Albert W. Rawlins
- David S. Robin
- Steven L. Rossi
- Tom Scarvie
- Ross D. Schlueter
- Christoph A. Steier
- Changchun Sun
- Hamed Tarawneh
- Weishi Wan
- Eric C. Williams