News

Powerful X-rays, energy tech, wireless electric-vehicle charging, big data, swarming robots, and cryo-electron microscopy are among some of the research themes that helped six faculty members earn Cornell Engineering Research Excellence Awards – the highest research honor given by the Ivy League’s top-ranked engineering college.

A natural food colorant called phycocyanin provides a fun, vivid blue in soft drinks, but it is unstable on grocery shelves. Cornell’s synchrotron is helping to steady it.

Greg Ray has been named the new Director of Strategic Partnerships at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotoron Source. In his role, Greg will work closely with the CHESS Director and Senior Leadership Team to provide strategic guidance, and interface with multiple partner organizations – creating and maintaining long-term relationships with external organizations and funding partners.

AFRL and Boeing collaborate with CHESS to enable real-time measurements of high performance thermoplastics in 3D printing composites processing. 

In a new publication, the team of Louise Debefve and Chris Pollock (both at the PIPOXS beamline at CHEXS) have evaluated 80 different DFT methods to reproduce the experimental geometries of Pt complexes, using a diverse training set of 14 platinum-containing species with varying sizes, oxidation states, and number and type of ligands.  

Echoing classical physics, quantum electrodynamics predicts the release of a spectral continuum of electromagnetic radiation upon the sudden acceleration of charged particles in quantum matter. Despite apparent theoretical success in describing sister nuclear processes, known as internal bremsstrahlung, following nuclear beta decay and K capture, the situation of the photoejection of an electron from an inner shell of an atom, intraatomic bremsstrahlung (IAB), is far from settled.

New in situ high-energy X-ray diffraction research using the FAST beamline tested cold-spraying in additive manufacturing. Researchers found a high concentration of manufacturing defects and that the load-bearing properties of the material can be improved via post-spray treatments.

During the summer maintenance period, we made significant progress on a huge number of jobs. A few of the highlights include major upgrades to our power distribution infrastructure, upgrades to the linac and synchrotron RF power supplies, and repairs and maintenance to our cooling water systems. We also installed a new wide band-pass multilayer monochromator on the FAST beamline and new white beam slits for QM2. These projects promise to improve the performance and reliability of our systems.