News

Last month, Linda Sapochack, NSF Division Director for the Division of Materials Research (DMR), Clark Cooper, Senior Advisor for Science and Head of the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the NSF Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and NSF Program Director Guebre X. Tessema visited CHESS to see the newly upgraded facility.

Arthur Woll the Director of Materials Solutions Network at CHESS explains some of the practical applications of their research.  

The Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) will create a new materials research subfacility, thanks to $7.1 million in funding from the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL).

"Wood-based ionic conductors are flexible, lightweight, biocompatible and based on sustainable materials that can enable large-scale manufacture and suitable for low-grade thermal energy harvesting."

"These characteristics makes XTM attractive as potential X-ray optics for high-pass harmonic selectors and tunable wide bandpass monochromators. With further instrumentation development, they can be potentially applied to high heat load filtering applications at synchrotrons."

A single human cell contains thousands of proteins that perform a vast array of functions, from fighting off viruses to transcribing DNA. By understanding the structure of these proteins, researchers can interpret their functions and develop methods for turning them on and off.

"Using CVD diamonds in X-ray monochromators enables affordable compact systems operable in a laboratory with conventional X-ray sources, under extreme conditions as high radiation heat load optics at synchrotrons, or, possibly, as compact remote X-ray instrumentation for planetary missions."

"The CHESS Users’ Meeting attracted a record number of 225 registered participants to the Cornell campus to look back at major milestones of the project and to discuss X-ray science enabled by the ambitious upgrade."