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For the past 10 years, the U.S. Air Force has funded research on high-performance materials at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS). The partnership has resulted in numerous advances, including a greater understanding of metal fatigue and analysis of the best metals for aircraft. This partnership was extended with $8 million in funding to CHESS as part of the fiscal year 2019 defense appropriations bill, a $674.4 billion package that President Donald Trump signed into law Oct. 1. The bill passed both the U.S. Senate – supported by New York Sens. Charles Schumer, who is Senate minority leader, and Kirsten Gillibrand – and the U.S. House of Representatives late last month.

This October marks the 50th anniversary of the dedication of the Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory. Initially built for $11million and promising to deliver cutting-edge research in elementary particle physics, it was the NSF’s largest project at that time. Fifty years later, the lab is going through its biggest upgrade in decades. 

In crystals, atoms sit at specific locations in the lattice. The arrangement is usually ordered, and properties can be predicted from such arrangements. Sometimes atoms become rearranged, swapping places, and then basic theories for material properties breakdown. In this work, we demonstrate a method to find the position of atoms in a more precise manner than typically used, and one which supplies more information about the atoms as well.

X-ray crystallography allows determination of the atomic structure of proteins, information that is essential to understanding the proteins. It was thought that there was a minimum size of crystal that could be used at storage ring x-ray sources. This paper shows that the minimum size barrier can be overcome.

A naturally occurring antibiotic called kanglemycin A is effective against Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, even in drug-resistant strains, according to an international team of researchers who used chemistry, molecular biology, microbiology, and X-ray crystallography to show how the compound maintains its activity.

Using two-color valence-to-core x-ray emission spectroscopy, researchers from Penn State and CHESS uncover new details about enzyme mechanism.

Grace King, a rising Junior, majoring in Physics at Vassar College and studying Engineering at Dartmouth College, participated in the REU program at Cornell this summer, and her research project is quite timely, as CHESS and CESR are currently undergoing their biggest upgrade in decades.

The construction portion of the CHESS-U upgrade is nearing completion as teams work to assemble the last of the experimental hutches. While there is still plenty of work to be done, the preparation for becoming a true 3rd-generation lightsource is paying off.