News

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.

The SERCCS/PREM/SUNRiSE Summer Students presented their research projects at a virtual Symposium & Poster Session on Friday, August 7th at 1pm. These presentations were the final highlight of the 8- week programs of students working with CHESS mentors. 

On July 31st, all seven CHESS beamlines scheduled for user operation in fall were being fully operated by remote connection - all at the same time - sometimes with 2 people connecting simultaneously to one machine. 

The recent upgrade of the storage ring has positioned CHESS as a synchrotron facility that is well-suited for in situ studies of materials dynamics with sub-microsecond temporal resolution.

Rather than analyze diffraction data with a physics-based X-ray model to try to extract structural information chosen a priori, a team comprised of researchers from CHEXS, Cornell, and NIST used the unsupervised learning technique, locally linear embedding (LLE), to condense X-ray data down to critical microstructural (dislocation configuration) evolution information.