From the Director

Dear CHESS Community,

2018 has been an incredibly busy, exciting, and productive year for CHESS, filled with amazing scientific and technical accomplishments.  In the first half of the year, CHESS operated at full speed, providing jam-packed schedule of user operations. In the second half of the year, we performed the implementation phase of the CHESS-U upgrade project. We began by demolishing the entire CHESS experimental floor and the portions of CESR contained in Wilson Labs (that is, the portions not in the tunnel). We then upgraded the electrical power and cooling infrastructure for the facility, upgraded the RF power infrastructure, and rebuilt CESR and the CHESS experimental floor.

This project is a stunning example of Cornell’s ability to perform major scientific development projects both swiftly and economically. The project was meticulously planned and the only slippage in the schedule was caused by unanticipated delays in obtaining building permits and an associated requirement to install additional fire and life safety upgrades. Nevertheless, all the infrastructure, accelerator systems, and personnel and equipment safety systems will be in place and we will begin injecting current into CESR on January 15, 2019. 

We anticipate that CESR commissioning (minimum performance = 6.0Gev, 50mA and feedback operating) will take up to ten (10) weeks. Thus, on April 1 st we are planning to begin installing insertion devices (undulators) and commissioning x-ray beamlines. Each sector will take two to three weeks to commission and the various sectors will be commissioned sequentially. After commissioning, beamlines will be available for “commissioning projects” to developing experimental capabilities as the subsequent beamlines are being commissioned. These projects will be performed by expert users collaborating with CHESS scientists. Note that commissioning activities will almost certainly limit CESR currents, the amount of CESR operations, and, at times, access to the experimental floor.

Early in the first quarter of 2019, CHESS will publish preliminary descriptions of the new beamlines and indicate which are likely to be part of the national user facility and which will be operated for partners to guide users’ proposal development efforts.

CHESS will publish the expected capabilities of the new beamlines and issue a call for general user proposals as soon as our funding partners finalize their commitments and define their beamline access policies.

CHESS-U has transformed CHESS’s performance. We’re looking forward to the exciting science that will be performed here in the very near future.

Warmest wishes for a joyous holiday season and a happy new year.

Joel Brock

Industrial Impact at CHESS. Q&A with Justin Mach an Engineer at Caterpillar Inc. CHESS believes that science can be a driving force for economic growth. The InSitu group at CHESS particularly aims to partner with industry in the pursuit of expanding the country's advanced manufact-uring sector. By working directly with industrial users like Caterpillar Inc., ..
Hispanic-serving institutions partner with CHESS
Héctor D. Abruña, Professor in the Depart. of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, has been working to promote underrepresented minorities in the sciences at Cornell for more than 30 years.
His efforts and hard work are coming to fruition in the form of grant funding from the National Science Foundation, which will help students from his native Puerto Rico access the experimental resources and expertise available to them at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS).
X-ray Emission Spectroscopy:
an effective route to extract site occupation of cations. In crystals, atoms sit at specific locations in lattice. Sometimes atoms become rearranged, swapping places, in this work we demonstrate a method to find the position of atoms in a more precise manner....
Former CHESS User Forms Start-up Company for 3D Printing of Ceramics
Anatoly Berezkin, a former CHESS user, is taking his expertise of room temperature annealing to form a startup company in Munich, Germany...
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Defense spending bill extends Air Force research partnership with CHESS
For the past 10 years, the U.S. Air Force has funded research on high-performance materials at the CHESS. The partnership has resulted in numerous advances, including a greater understanding of metal fatigue and analysis of the best metals for aircraft...
Solving protein structure from sparse serial microcrystal diffraction data at a storage ring synchrotron source.
Cornell University and CHESS scientists have developed a method to analyze x-ray SMX data that have previously been thought to be too weak to be of use. In this paper, the Cornell method was applied to the data that Martin-Garcia et al. had discarded as unusable. The resultant structure was comparable to that determined from the larger crystals.  
50 Years Later, Wilson Lab Stays Cutting Edge...
This past October marked the 50th anniversary of the dedication of the Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory. Initially built for $11million ... Fifty years later, the lab is going through its biggest upgrade in decades...
Workshop on electric circuits spreads a current of enthusiasm from NYS to Puerto Rico
On a cold Saturday morning on October 13, things were heating up in the 7thfloor of Clark Hall. A small group of teachers from all over New York State along with a representative from Puerto Rico, gathered in the Bethe auditorium to learn how to teach electric circuits following the New York State Science Learning Standards. And had a great time while at it!
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Issue No. 58 • 2018.12.18
CHESS
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