Michael Borland of the Argonne Accelerator Systems Division has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. The honor recognizes his "outstanding contributions to fourth-generation light sources, particularly for development and support of the program ELEGANT, the first integrated accelerator code to realistically model coherent synchrotron radiation effects."

ELEGANT had its genesis more than 20 years ago during Borland's thesis work at Stanford University. After coming to Argonne in 1991, Borland developed the code extensively in response to the needs of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) project.  The code was instrumental in demonstrating the safety of top-up operation for storage rings and developing the present low-emittance configuration, thus ushering in a new era of APS operation.  Later, Borland extended ELEGANT to deal with the challenges of fourth-generation linac-based light sources.  As a result, ELEGANT is used world-wide by accelerator physicists designing short-wavelength free-electron lasers and energy recovery linacs.

In 2007, Borland received a University of Chicago Distinguished Performance Award for his work on software for accelerator research.  In 1996, he was co-recipient of a University of Chicago Distinguished Performance Award for his role in the design and commissioning of the APS accelerator complex.