The workshops open with the annual CHESS Users Meeting, June 7-8. This meeting brings together CHESS users, scientists and staff to discuss research taking place at the facility, as well as the ongoing upgrades to both CHESS and the Cornell Electron Storage Ring.
“There are lots of things going on at CHESS, including the upgrade,” said Ernie Fontes, associate director of CHESS, noting that the upgrade projects that visitors will hear about should be complete during the current $100 million National Science Foundation funding award period, which expires in 2019.
“Come 2019, we’re going to need renewal from the NSF for another five years of operation,” he said. “As part of that, we’re inviting scientists to come here and discuss far-future-frontier science. That’s three years down the road for scientists, who usually only think as far ahead as next week.”
CHESS is supported by the NSF’s Divisions of Materials Research, Engineering and Biological Sciences, and provides synchrotron X-ray capabilities to roughly 1,200 users each year. The current series of upgrades is expected to culminate in a hundred-thousandfold increase in spectral brightness and a thousandfold increase in flux, putting the facility on par with the best continuous-duty hard X-ray sources in the world.
Fontes said the future of CHESS will depend, in part, on what its users want to see.
“We’ll bring in scientists from physics, chemistry, biology and other fields,” Fontes said, “and what they’ll tell us is how they want us to change and grow our facility.”
There are six workshops planned following the users meeting, three of them slated for June 8-9. Workshops will include:
June 8: Biomolecules in Motion – focusingon motion of biomolecules (proteins, nucleic acids, complexes), which occurs as they perform their functions.
June 8: Synchrotron Resources for Future Investigations of Thin-Film Growth, Processing and Characterization – bringingtogether leaders in both thin-film technologies and synchrotron science to discuss the role synchrotron science can and should play in helping advance thin-film technologies.
June 8-9: New Industrial and Scientific Opportunities for Structural Materials: Data, Modeling, Manufacturing – exploring problems that are most relevant to science and industry in the field of structural materials. Talks will include discussion of how recent research is making new contributions to long-standing problems, as well as developments in emerging, cutting-edge techniques.
June 13-14: Materials Design and Processing from Nano to Mesoscale – focusing on how the strengths of CHESS, combined with scientists’ expertise and vision, can help identify important science applications and major developments in exploratory techniques in materials design and processing, from nanoscale to mesoscale.
June 20-21: Hard X-ray Spectroscopies and Imaging – dual sessions, to run in parallel, exploring opportunities in high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy (session 1) and synchrotron-radiation-based hard X-ray microscopy (session 2), both enabled by upgrade to single beam operation with undulator sources.
June 27-28: D3: Defects, Distortions and Dynamics in complex materials – addressingemerging opportunities in high energy single crystal diffraction using next-generation pixel array detectors, as a probe of lattice-coupled effects in quantum materials.
All sessions are free of charge. There will be a dinner on the first evening of each session that is also free for workshop participants.