There are many questions about the behavior of proteins under pressure that have not been experimentally resolved. Some very simple but important examples are: how does a protein crystal’s structure change as a function of pressure, and how large an external pressure can be sustained by the crystal?  To answer such questions, X-ray crystallography is the obvious method of choice, but requires the use of a pressure cell capable of precise control of pressure, with small steps between successive pressures.

Before he could build the wiggler at CHESS, an opportunity arose for Ken to learn how to use the first hard x-ray undulator prototype for APS.  Ken participated in a month-long beam test on how to steer the beam through the undulator.  "My 'particle of choice' was neutrons," says Ken, "and this was a chance for me to learn how x-rays work.”

Samuel Barton came into his internship with Summer Engineering and Research for Community College Students thinking he would be working with high pressure deep ocean particles, but the COVID-19 pandemic steered his internship in another direction. The change suited Sam nicely, since his Hudson Valley Community College degree is in Engineering Science and he will be transferring to the Cornell College of Engineering this fall to major in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded CHESS a Research Advanced by Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering (RAISE) grant to create a collaborative materials gateway for x-ray imaging and modeling of microstructures. 

PREM/SUNRISE/SERCCS Symposium August 7 1PM

(From the workshop description) Small angle X-ray and neutron scattering (SAXS/SANS, or SAS) has experienced dramatic growth over the past fifteen years within the structural biology community, emerging as an important and versatile analytical technique for the study of the structure and function of biological macromolecules in solution.

The past twenty years have seen vast strides forward in developing electron, X-ray, and neutron diffraction-based characterizations that probe engineering alloys during in-situ processing and thermo-mechanical loading at increasingly short time scales. However, the full utility of these experiments is limited in that the analyses of the measured data extract only a fraction of the encoded information about the microstructure at any given time.

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. Many other synchrotron user facilities in the US and world-wide are pursuing upgrades to maximize the spatial coherence of their x-ray beams, which is accomplished by reducing the emittance (effectively, the cross-sectional area in phase space) of the electron beam in the storage ring.

Life on Earth manages to exist in the Mariana Trench and deep below the ocean floor, where extreme conditions create large effects on the behavior of biological molecules.

Scientific experts in the research community review and score beamtime proposals submitted to CHESS for their scientific merit. These reviews are crucial to identify the most impactful science that can be done at our facility. To determine how CHESS can improve the reviewer experience, we asked the proposal reviewers to take a brief survey. 68% of the reviewers respond and a summary of the results is shown below. Thanks to all CHESS reviewers for participating in the survey and reviewing proposals for CHESS!