In some ways, it’s no surprise Jie Liu grew up to be an engineer. She’s following in the footsteps of her father, who made engineering his career. From a young age, she said, she was fascinated by the big machines her father worked on, and she would take bicycles apart and put them back together, learning how they worked. Now she works as a principal mechanical engineer on the upgrade of the Advanced Photon Source, a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne.

You are invited to participate in a workshop on “Data Handling at the APS Coherent High-Energy X-ray (CHEX) Sector.” This online workshop will be held via Microsoft Teams on Thursday and Friday, October 21 and 22, 2021.

The Advanced Photon Source will hold a virtual town hall for users interested in the project to construct the Coherent Surface Scattering Imaging (CSSI) feature beamline at 9-ID. The town hall runs from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. CDT on Wednesday, October 6, 2021.

The APS will hold a virtual town hall for users interested in the project to construct the X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy feature beamline at 8-ID. The town hall runs from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., CDT, on Monday, September 20, 2021.

The most visible sign that the APS Upgrade Project is proceeding is the Long Beamline Building, home to two of the stations where researchers will carry out cutting-edge science experiments using the brighter x-ray beams. Construction of this new building has progressed ahead of schedule since its groundbreaking ceremony on July 22, 2020, and is on track for completion in June 2022.

The Advanced Photon Source is holding a virtual town hall for users interested in the project to construct the Advanced Spectroscopy and LERIX (ASL) beamline at 25-ID. The town hall began at 10:00 a.m. CDT today, Wednesday, September 1, 2021.

The APS/IIT 2021 XAFS Virtual Summer School was successfully held Aug 1-4 2021 online. This was a joint effort of IIT and the Advanced Photon Source and beamline staff.  More than a dozen people from ANL and IIT served as synchronous instructors, including Steve Heald, Matt Newville, Shelly Kelly, and other beamline scientists from the APS, and Grant Bunker, Carlo Segre, and Jeff Terry from IIT Physics Department. 

The 1,000th magnet for the Advanced Photon Source Upgrade has arrived at Argonne.  The 1,000th magnet is an eight-pole fast corrector magnet, which is used to alter the trajectory of the electron beam as it circulates around the storage ring at nearly the speed of light.

A feature story on the Argonne home page notes that "For more than 25 years, the Advanced Photon Source’s intense X-rays have enabled important breakthroughs. With a massive upgrade in the works, scientists will be able to see things at scale never seen before." The article provides a comprehensive look at the APS past, present, and future, including the role APS users played in the fight against COVID-19.

The call is now open for FY2023 applications for both the Maria Goeppert Mayer and Walter Massey fellowships.

In an interview with the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), APS user Stuart Stock (Northwestern University) discusses how x-ray diffraction reveals details of mummified remains.

To hear Xianbo Shi tell it, there is no substitute for on-the-job training in the field of X-ray optics. There is no particular educational track, he says, that will teach you how to design the complex series of synchrotron beamline optics (mirrors, lenses, monochromators, etc.) that manipulate powerful X-ray beams for scientific purposes. If you want to learn, you have to put down the books and go work at an X-ray facility.

As part of the recent APS/CNM Users Meeting, the APS Upgrade project hosted a question-and-answer session to address user questions about the timing and scope of the upgrade, and the benefits of the new storage ring and beamlines. Chief Project Officer Jim Kerby was joined by Jonathan Lang, X-ray Science Division Director, and Susan White De Pace, manager of the APS user programs. A document of frequently asked questions, including those asked at the Q&A session, has been compiled.

From Fox 32 News Chicago: Happy Birthday to a local lab that has been helping solve the world's problems for decades! Argonne National Laboratory is turning 75. Technology at the Lemont lab helps scientists at Argonne National Laboratory see tiny things to make huge discoveries. "The smaller the thing that you look at, the bigger the facility, so the APS is huge. You can fit Wrigley Field in the center of our electronic storage ring," said Stephen Streiffer, the Deputy Laboratory Director for Science and Technology.

Jan Ilavsky, physicist and beamline scientist with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Photon Source, has been named a Fellow of the American Crystallographic Association. Ilavsky is one of seven scientists named to the ACA Fellows class of 2021.

Work by Richard Prum (Yale University), Vinod Saranathan of Yale-NUS College at the National University of Singapore, and others in recent years has made progress on understanding how some birds produce the structural colors behind their brilliant blue plumage: a process of phase separation.

Scientists are preparing for a possible next coronavirus pandemic to strike. In future-looking research, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine scientists have identified a novel target for a drug to treat SARS-CoV-2 that also could impact a new emerging coronavirus. The study provides critical information that could aid drug development against future coronaviruses as well as SARS-CoV-2. Data was collected at the Life Sciences Collaborative Access Team at the Advanced Photon Source.

Could new treatments for hospitalized COVID-19 patients emerge from San Antonio? Scientists at four local [San Antonio] research institutions have laid the groundwork for such discoveries with a study [carried out at the APS] that showed how coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-2 can hide in the body and circumvent our immune defenses.

Shelly Kelly is assuming leadership of the X-ray Science Division Spectroscopy Group.

Si Chen, a physicist with the X-ray Science Division Microscopy Group at Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source, is one of six Argonne researchers who have received FY 2021 U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Program awards.