About
ARC is a pilot program for 2027 beamtime designed to advance high-impact user science through the practical development, testing, and refinement of artificial intelligence (AI) workflows across ALS beamlines. This is a special, off-cycle proposal call that is separate from our general user proposal call.
ARC projects involve close partnerships between ALS beamline scientists and user teams to pursue scientific objectives that depend on AI integration, whether for measurement optimization, data analysis, or scientific reasoning, to succeed. Participating teams commit to sharing the resulting data, code, models, and related documentation among all team members and with the ALS, helping build AI capabilities and reusable tools that benefit the broader user community.
Proposals may request access to up to three beamlines. Awarded projects will receive a substantial allocation of beamtime across up to three beamlines during the 2027-1 and 2027-2 cycles to test, refine, and validate their proposed AI pipelines in active experimental environments. Continued participation is contingent on satisfactory progress toward the proposed scientific and workflow-development milestones.
Who Is It For?
ARC proposals are partnerships between ALS beamline scientists and external users. Multi-investigator and multi-beamline collaborations are strongly encouraged.
Key Dates
| September 9–27* | Pre-proposals accepted |
| October 5 | Pre-proposal decisions announced |
| October 5–19* | Invited full proposals accepted |
| November | Beamtime decisions announced |
| *Submissions accepted until 11:59 PM PT | |
How to Apply
Review the full submission process, step by step →
Ready to Apply?
Be sure you’ve worked closely to collaborate with a beamline scientist first. Pre-proposals are only accepted for projects the beamline scientist has agreed to collaborate on.
Last page update: September 8, 2026