What a terrific spring and early summer it has been for the Advanced Photon Source (APS). Our team has been proud to witness their years of hard work coming to fruition with first light from the renewed APS. I am thrilled to say we delivered our first X-ray beams to a scientific beamline on June 17, 2024. As you’ll read in the links below, the APS team has achieved milestone after milestone since the accelerator readiness review and has now begun the process of opening the shutters, after careful review and multiple stages of commissioning. More than 70 beamlines will see light in the months to come.

The first scientific beamline to receive X-rays was 27-ID, home of the resonant inelastic X-ray scattering program, followed quickly by 29-ID, and 25-ID.

We plan to dedicate the reinvented facility on July 17, 2024, and pause to recognize the team of amazing individuals from the Photon Sciences directorate, the APS Upgrade project team, Argonne National Laboratory, and other visionaries past and present who dreamed of, worked to fund, and built a machine like no other.

As we begin to welcome back users this fall, the upgraded APS will take important first steps to empower pivotal discoveries at extraordinary speeds. We are excited to start leveraging the facility with Argonne's exascale computer, Aurora, to accelerate scientific advances in clean energy and decarbonization; develop new materials for transportation, energy, and electronic devices; advance quantum technologies; and so much more.

I fully expect the renewed APS will leave a lasting legacy of world-changing science, and I'm very much looking forward to sharing future updates.

Sincerely,
Laurent Chapon
Associate Laboratory Director, Photon Sciences
Director, Advanced Photon Source

Shine on: Upgraded Advanced Photon Source sees first X-ray light for science

A new era of science at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) is ready to begin. On June 17, 2024, the facility delivered its first X-ray light beams to a scientific beamline as part of a comprehensive and complex upgrade.

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World's first successful multi-bunch swap-out injection demonstrated at the Advanced Photon Source

The upgraded Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory is now the world's first synchrotron light source to use a multi-bunch swap-out method of replenishing the electron beam in its storage ring.

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Vadim Sajaev leads the effort to get the upgraded Advanced Photon Source up and running

In addition to leading commissioning of the new electron storage ring at the APS, Vadim Sajaev also assumed the role of interim director of the Accelerator Systems division at the APS in April 2024.

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From California dreams to the APS beamlines, Grace Avellar supports the APS Upgrade

The allure of one day working at a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory was deeply rooted in mechanical engineering specialist Grace Avellar's childhood.

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Burak Guzelturk recipient of 2024 ACS Nano Lectureship Laureate

Physicist Burak Guzelturk is one of the 2024 recipients of the ACS Nano Lectureship. The annual award recognizes two outstanding early career investigators who are within 10 years of their PhDs and who have made substantial impacts in the field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. ACS Nano is a publication of the American Chemical Society.

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Shifting electrolysis cathodes away from scarce, expensive iridium

Splitting water using renewable electricity to produce green hydrogen is seen by many as essential for achieving net-zero carbon emissions. A group of scientists has recently demonstrated a new type of low-cost catalyst that could slash the cost and boost the efficiency of green hydrogen production through water-splitting.

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A small, but very fast, step toward a vaccine against HIV

Even with effective anti-retroviral treatment that can give AIDS patients an almost normal lifespan, 1.5 million people are newly infected each year and a preventive vaccine is still urgently needed. Research from a team at Duke University and the University of Chicago using time-resolved, temperature-jump, small-angle X-ray scattering at the University of Chicago's BioCARS 14-ID-B beamline at the Advanced Photon Source has provided new findings on the microsecond dynamics of the viral envelope glycoprotein structure that could jumpstart the next round of vaccine development.

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Observing Electronic Flat Bands in a 3D Pyrochlore Lattice

In this research, scientists endeavored to create flat bands in 3D materials. They did this by synthesizing calcium-nickel (CaNi2) crystals featuring a star-shaped pattern called a pyrochlore lattice. This lattice is related to the 2D hexagonal shape that has previously been shown to produce 2D flat bands. The researchers detected flat bands in a 3D pyrochlore lattice using sophisticated techniques, including angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy performed at the Advanced Photon Source.

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Decades after prediction, potential applications of rippled β sheets becoming clearer

Recent research conducted at the Northeastern Collaborative Access Team (NE-CAT) beamline at 24-ID-E at the Advanced Photon Source has extended our understanding of rippled β sheet structures at the atomic level. Researchers predict these structures may be useful tools for the creation of improved biomaterials, such as more stable hydrogels for drug delivery, and may have therapeutic uses in understanding or perhaps treating diseases where misfolding and aggregation of toxic peptides has been shown to be important to disease development, such as in Alzheimer's disease and type 2 diabetes.

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The Crossroads Between Synthetic DNA and Understanding the Origins of Life

Recent work conducted at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and National Cancer Institute Structural Biology Facility beamline 23-ID-B of the APS by a team of researchers from Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the University of Chicago found some answers to questions that could both move the field of directed evolution of DNA polymerases toward development of new treatments for diseases and improve our understanding of the origins of life at the same time.

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Argonne's Aurora supercomputer breaks exascale barrier

The Aurora supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory has officially surpassed the exascale threshold, measuring over a quintillion calculations per second on the new Top500 list.

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