News

Dear Colleagues, At Cornell, the fall semester began on September 2nd with a hybrid approach to teaching (in-person and online), robust virus testing, and modifications to the academic calendar allowing students to return home for Thanksgiving and then finish the semester on-line. Cornell provides information on its web site related to COVID-19 and the status Cornell Ithaca campus. 

The COVID-19 pandemic halted plans to host annual on-campus summer research experiences for undergraduates from institutions across the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Cornell faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate student mentors, however, quickly pulled together to shift course and move these programs online, allowing about 90 undergraduates to experience virtual research at Cornell.

Particle storage rings are highly complex scientific instruments and minute changes in temperature, position or current through one of its many magnets can have a large impact on the position of the particle beam. At CHESS, the accelerator group works tirelessly to even further improve the beam position stability and with that to enhance experimental capabilities at the beamlines.

To study how protein structures are impacted by external pressure a team of researchers developed a novel diamond anvil cell optimized for the study of macromolecules at external pressures up to 12kbar at the NSF, NIH and NY State supported FlexX beamline.

In February 1988, Ken first arrived at CHESS with his first assignment: to build a wiggler. Since that time, Ken has been instrumental in keeping CHESS at the forefront of X-Ray emission spectroscopy, and that first wiggler (for many years called F line wiggler) is still in the tunnel generating x-rays for Sector 1.  Ken is now retiring, leaving his mark on not only CHESS, but the synchrotron community at large. 

“I’m helping build this, but I’m also benefiting from it...the better job I do, the more information I have."

The collaboration created by RAISE converges structural materials data collected from the FAST and SMB beamlines at CHESS with the new technologies being developed at NSF High Performance Computing sites to create a Science Gateway.

Richard Gillillan, CHESS Staff Scientist, conducted a SAXS workshop at the ACA conference late last month. Organized by former CHESS postdoc Jesse Hopkins, and now staff scientist at the Advanced Photon Source, students learned about this useful technique and its applications from the people that have written the book on Small Angle X-Ray Scattering.