ALSHub, the ALS Scheduler, and the ESAF system will be down from Wednesday, August 6, at 3:00 pm Pacific time through Monday, August 11, and again August 15–17 due to planned utility outages during the ALS maintenance summer shutdown. We apologize for any inconvenience.
A new strategy to “write” electronic silicon and germanium nanostructures could simplify nanomaterial electronic circuit fabrication by circumventing the difficult assembly step. PEEM-2 and PEEM-3 confirm the quality of the written nanostructures. Read more…
Materials that are mechanically, thermally, and chemically stable at extreme conditions are valuable for applications in aerospace engineering and fission/fusion research. A research team working at ALS Beamline 12.2.2 and 12.3.2 has synthesized and characterized two novel materials that fit the bill: rhenium nitrides Re2N and Re3N are both extremely incompressible and ultra hard. Read more…
The ALS User Meeting will be held October 3-5, 2011. Read details in this month’s UEC Corner.
Farewell ALS Retirees!
Last Friday, nearly 100 people attended a goodbye barbeque in honor of Jun (Donna) Hamamoto, Ken Woolfe, and Chris Timossi, who retired at the end of June. Ken and Chris were part of the Engineering Division, but were matrixed to the ALS and Jun supported the user scientific program for many years as Experiment Setup Coordinator. Combined they had nearly 100 years of service at Berkeley Lab and the ALS. We thank them for their years of hard work and dedication–they will surely be missed!
The ALS dome is getting a bit of a face lift during the summer shutdown. The interior and exterior of the roof are both having work done, new power supplies are being installed, and more! Read about the shutdown activities on the new Shutdown Update Web page, which will be updated periodically as work continues.
Call for Proposals: General Sciences
The User Office is accepting new General User Proposals from scientists who wish to conduct research at the ALS during the next cycle. There are a number of changes to the proposal submission form. It has been reorganized and will now include data on the previous productivity of the group at the ALS. There are also changes for the users of roll-up endstations. If you have any problems with the updated form please send your feedback to the ALS User Office.
Visit our Web site for information on how to Apply for Beamtime, or follow the link below:
PROPOSAL SUBMISSION DEADLINE for General Sciences Beamlines Cycle: January – June 2012 Deadline: July 15, 2011
BEAM TIME REQUESTS on ACTIVE PROPOSALS Proposals for general sciences beamlines are considered active for two years, or until the total shifts requested in the proposal have been used. If you are the PI or experiment leader of an active proposal for which you would like to request beam time during the July-December 2012 cycle, you should have received an email with instructions and login details.
ALS Sets New Top-Off Record for Contiguous User Light
The ALS has achieved a new record for light provided to users in top-off mode without an unscheduled interruption: from May 11-May 25, 2011, 250.1 hours of contiguous light was provided (equivalent to 10 days and 10 hours time). The previous record was set from Jan. 27-Feb. 5, 2011, when 191 hours of continuous light was provided (equivalent to 7 days and 23 hours). Congratulations to all who made this possible!
New Faces at the ALS
Since February 2011, the ALS has welcomed several new faces to the facility. If you see these people around, say hello and introduce yourself.
From left to right:
– James McDaniel (contractor) is a material handler working with the ALS facilities crew in Building 7 – Nikolay Artemiev (Sr. Scientific Engineering Associate) has joined the Optical Metrology Lab – Sean Nord and Jillian Marie Eymann are both training to be accelerator and floor operators – Xiaodan Gu (student assistant) works on Beamline 7.3.3 researching the use of graphene nano-mesh to fabricate thin film transistors
Incoming summer students Emma Floyd, Melinda Chen, and Chris Creighton are not pictured.
Card-Key Safety Training Access Pilot Program
On July 11, the ALS will begin a pilot program with Berkeley Lab to institute an automatic check of training records whenever card-key access to the ALS experiment hall is used. The system will check to see if the badge owner has completed ALS1001, “Safety at the ALS,” within the last year. If training is not current, access will not be granted. While this is not a new requirement, we are piloting this new system to more efficiently and effectively implement an already existing training requirement.
To aid in making this transition a smooth one, all staff and users are asked to double-check their current training status for this course. For more information, contact ALS EH&S Program Office (Jim Flyod, Manager or Tennessee Gock, Administrator).
The 2011 ALS User Meeting is only four months away: October 3-5, 2011! Please mark your calendars and plan to attend. The User Meeting Web site is open so users can view the tentative agenda and review the 14 workshops that willfollow the conclusion of the plenary session on Tuesday and extend through Wednesday. The streamlined registration process will allow attendees to select which workshops they would like to attend, submit poster abstracts for the student poster competition, and/or submit poster titles for the general poster session.
In addition to plenary sessions and workshops, this year’s meeting will feature:
– General poster session and reception – Student “Poster Slam” and Competition –Exhibitors of synchrotron-related equipment –ALS staff and user photo contest –Presentation of the:
David A. Shirley Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement at the ALS
Klaus Halbach Award for Innovative Instrumentation at the ALS
Tim Renner User Services Award for Outstanding Support to the ALS User Community
For the user runs from May 4 to June 13, 2011, the beam reliability [(time scheduled – time lost)/time scheduled)] was 99.3%. For this period, the mean time between failures (MTBF) was 59.7 hours, and the mean time to recovery (MTTR) was 33 minutes. There were no significant interruptions. During the period from May 11-May 25, 2011, ALS also set a new MaxTBF record: 250.1 hours of light was provided to users without an unscheduled interruption.
More detailed information on reliability is available on the ALS reliability bulletin board, which is located in the hallway between the ALS and the control room in Building 80. Questions about beam reliability should be directed to Dave Richardson (DBRichardson@lbl.gov, x4376).
Long-term and weekly operations schedules are available on the Web. Requests for special operations use of the “scrubbing” shift should be sent to Rick Bloemhard (ALS-CR@lbl.gov, x4738) by 1:00 p.m. Friday. The beam status in real time can be found on the ALS home page; however, we are in shutdown mode until August 11, 2011.
Benedict Feinberg has stepped in as the Interim Deputy Director for Science at the ALS. Learn more about Ben’s history at the ALS, his scientific research, and his plans in this role. Read the Article
Announcements
ALS Science Café July 27 The next ALS Science Café will be held on Wednesday, July 27 at noon in the User Support Building’s main conference room. Speakers will include Hans Bechtle (Infrared Beamline 1.4), Gerry McDermott (National Center for X-Ray Tomograhy), and Ruihua He (Beamline 8.0.1); their talk titles will be announced shortly. If you would like to participate in a future Science Café, contact Liz Moxon.
A workshop will be held at Berkeley Lab August 2-3, 2011, to discuss new possibilities for the application of soft x-ray coherent scattering and imaging across a broad range of scientific disciplines. The workshop, “COSMIC at the ALS: New Frontiers in Soft X-Ray Coherent Scattering and Imaging,” will focus on the application of a new beamline facility under construction at the ALS for soft x-ray Coherent Scattering and Microscopy (COSMIC).
ALS User Greets Las Vegas Travellers
Visitors to Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport are now welcomed to the city by a large poster of ALS user Clemens Heske in front of a gleaming Scienta analyzer. Heske, currently professor of chemistry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has spent many years, as a postdoc and user on ALS Beamline 8.0.1, studying the surfaces and interfaces of devices involved in energy conversion. Read more about Heske’s research projects.
Last Friday, nearly 100 people attended a goodbye barbeque in honor of Jun (Donna) Hamamoto, Ken Woolfe, and Chris Timossi, who retired at the end of June. Ken and Chris were part of the Engineering Division, but were matrixed to the ALS and Jun supported the user scientific program for many years as Experiment Setup Coordinator. Combined they had nearly 100 years of service at Berkeley Lab and the ALS. We thank them for their years of hard work and dedication–they will surely be missed!
The ALS has achieved a new record for light provided to users in top-off mode without an unscheduled interruption: from May 11-May 25, 2011, 250.1 hours of contiguous light was provided (equivalent to 10 days and 10 hours time). The previous record was set from Jan. 27-Feb. 5, 2011, when 191 hours of continuous light was provided (equivalent to 7 days and 23 hours). Congratulations to all who made this possible!
