Dear CHESS community,

I am thrilled to share some exciting news with you. This Tuesday, the U.S. National Science Foundation announced that CHESS won a $20M mid-scale infrastructure award to build a new beamline. This is a significant milestone for our community.

This groundbreaking project – the X-rays for Life, Environmental, Agriculture, and Plant Sciences (XLEAP) - will be a vital resource for our growing CHESS user community, fulfilling the need for X-ray fluorescence-based imaging technology and the supporting infrastructure to support research on living plants. This development is truly a game-changer, and we are eager to commence construction on this transformative facility.

One of the most exciting aspects of XLEAP is its potential to allow researchers to explore live soil and plant systems under controlled growth conditions at CHESS. This opens up new possibilities for discoveries that will significantly impact agriculture, sustainability, and food security.

The beamline will be constructed in the recently completed new experimental hall, Wilson West, adjacent to the High Magnetic Field (HMF) beamline. If you plan to visit CHESS for an upcoming beamtime, I encourage you to explore this new space. The CHESS team has been hard at work, and we are thrilled to continue our journey towards scientific excellence.

In addition to the XLEAP project, I am delighted to announce a new operating mode at CHESS – the CHESS Timing Mode. This mode of storage ring operation allows researchers to image processes on time scales ranging from nanoseconds to microseconds, providing unparalleled insights into phenomena such as chemical reactions, shock wave propagation, phase transitions, and biological processes.

CHESS is uniquely positioned to become the premier light source for timing mode experiments in this time range.

For those interested in exploring the potential impact of timing mode on their research, I encourage you to engage with your CHESS staff scientist.

As we look ahead, I want to invite you to mark your calendars for the CHESS User Meeting on June 4th, 2024, hosted on the Cornell campus. Alongside the user meeting, we will be hosting our first X-CITE workshop, allowing users to navigate the intricacies of software used at CHESS and maximize their beamtime. Stay tuned for more information on this workshop. 

Thank you for being an integral part of the CHESS community. We are enthusiastic about the future and anticipate sharing more updates with you soon.

Best regards,

Joel Brock, Director, CHESS (email Joel)