Skip to main content

ALS

Home / Homepage News Grid

UEC Nominations Due October 28

The Advanced Light Source Users’ Executive Committee (UEC) invites nominations for its upcoming election for five new UEC members (2023–2025 term). Nominations will be accepted through Friday, October 28, 2022. Membership in the ALS UEC shall be open to those users, including students, who are interested in research at the ALS. Read more »

Summer 2022 Shutdown Recap

The ALS returned to user operations on August 23 after its summer shutdown. The work included larger projects, such as installation of magnet stands for the ALS-U accumulator ring and the replacement of the liquid nitrogen tank, as well as several other facility improvements. Read more »

Tracy Mattox, User Services Group Leader

The new user services group leader is coming to the ALS from our neighboring user facility, the Molecular Foundry, where she has been supporting and collaborating with users for 15 years. Outside of the lab, she is a track and field coach, yoga instructor, and children’s book author. Read more »

A New Material System for Mixed-Plastic Recycling

Scientists have designed a new material system to overcome one of the biggest challenges in recycling consumer products: mixed-plastic recycling. Their achievement will help enable a much broader range of fully recyclable plastic products and brings into reach an efficient circular economy for durable goods like automobiles. Read more »

Valeriy Yashchuk Receives 2022 Klaus Halbach Award

Valeriy Yashchuk aims to make the binary pseudo-random calibration tool (BPR) the internationally recognized standard for thorough characterization of a broad spectrum of topography measuring tools. Others might find it daunting to convince scientists around the world to agree on one standard, but Yashchuk is accustomed to roadblocks, and finding creative solutions to them. The ALS Users’ Executive Committee recognized Yashchuk, program lead for metrology, for developing this critical technology. Read more »

Steve Kevan Says, “See You Soon!”

After announcing his impending retirement earlier this year, ALS Director Steve Kevan has worked to ensure a smooth transition to the interim ALS management team. He shares his vision of the collaborative future of the ALS and his goal to return as a user before saying not a farewell, but a “see you soon!” Read more »

Kevan Anderson and the BCG Receive 2022 Renner User Services Award

At this year’s ALS User Meeting, Kevan Anderson, on behalf of the Beamline Controls Group (BCG), was honored with the 2022 Tim Renner User Services Award. The ALS Users’ Executive Committee made the selection for “broad expertise in control systems and software development, and professional judgment and decision-making, which have greatly contributed to the research and development program of the Advanced Light Source.” Read more »

Disorder Drives Long-Range Order in “Tetris Ice” Nanomagnet Arrays

Long-range ordering is typically associated with a decrease in disorder, or entropy. Yet, it can also be driven by increasing entropy in certain special cases. In a recent DOE-funded study, researchers demonstrated that certain artificial spin-ice arrays—nanomagnets lithographically patterned to form Tetris-like shapes—can produce such entropy-driven order. Read more »

Deep-Learning AI Program Accurately Predicts Key Rotavirus Protein Fold

Rotaviruses are the major causative agents of gastroenteritis worldwide. Attempts to design vaccines are complicated by the rotaviruses’ enormous genetic and immunological diversity. At the ALS, researchers validated the novel structure of a key rotavirus protein, predicted using AlphaFold2, a deep-learning artificial-intelligence program. Read more »

Jinghua Guo to Receive the 2022 Shirley Award

ALS senior scientist Jinghua Guo is the recipient of this year’s Shirley Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement at the ALS. Guo is being recognized for pioneering the development of operando soft x-ray spectroscopy, work that’s enabled studies under realistic conditions, which is of great importance in environmental and energy research. Read more »