Colleagues,

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Argonne’s upgraded Advanced Photon Source (APS) has generated its first X-ray light. Yesterday, the APS team delivered X-ray beams to the first of its scientific beamlines, signaling a new era of groundbreaking research.

We began this comprehensive upgrade more than a decade ago. We paused operations of the APS user facility for the past year as we removed the original electron storage ring, installed a new one in its place, and installed or modified beamlines. Now, with the storage ring ramping up beam current, the APS is gradually reopening beamlines and preparing to welcome back users for new experiments.

Reaching this point has been the work of hundreds of people from across the lab, and I’m grateful for their resilience, talent, and exceptional efforts. Our teams have delivered with excellence and expertise. Most impressively, they’ve exemplified our core value of safety. We are privileged to support such a transformative endeavor.

Ultimately, the upgraded APS will generate X-ray beams that are up to 500 times brighter than those of the original machine and will offer a new generation of beamlines with unprecedented capabilities. With our new advanced tools, our mission to unravel the formidable complexity of systems in the natural sciences, from biology to quantum physics, will become even more inspiring. The scientific community will rapidly find multiple paths to push promising innovations to benefit society, just as they did with the original APS.

Together with the new Aurora exascale supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, the upgraded APS will break down barriers to discovery and enable explorations into uncharted areas. These two facilities will lead the transformation of Argonne and ensure our place at the forefront of global scientific research.

The upgrade of the APS continues with the restart of more than 70 beamlines — some new, some enhanced — over the next year. The discoveries made at these beamlines will only grow more impactful as the new facility ramps up to full power. It’s an exciting time for our laboratory and for our country as the APS lights the way to tomorrow.