In preparation for the need to collect, analyze, and archive up to 100 terabytes of data per year, CHESS has launched an initiative to upgrade its computing infrastructure, drawing on the host laboratory's decades-long experience with operating high-energy physics experiments. Among the planned improvements are new high-throughput redundant storage devices for data collection at each x-ray beamline, an offsite magnetic tape archive for long-term storage, cutting-edge processors for immediate data analysis, and a high-speed 10-gigabit network to connect all these elements together.

The monochromator consists of benders (for sagittal focusing), tilt stages (for diffraction angle adjustments), and several travel stages (for aligning monochromator crystals).

Hiroaki Sai initially thought it was a mistake. Instead, his “mistake” was the first indication of a major breakthrough in the development of a new method of synthesizing porous polymer film.

“I was trying to make something that has a dense polymer film . . . if the polymers do not have these large pores [they are] usually transparent, and usually, transparent films are good,” Sai explains with a laugh. “When I looked at the film it was opaque, it was pretty much white. So, I thought ‘Junk film.’”

Eukaryotic cells have found a nifty way of compacting this long strand into a more manageable size so that a cell can easily contain it. By wrapping portions of the DNA around histone octamers, the primary level of compactness is reached, which forms the basic building block of chromatin. Access to any portion of the DNA strand is ensured by continual remodeling of the chromatin structure, whereby small access sites are created and closed shortly after – just long enough for the cell to read that portion of the genetic code.

Spin coating is a standard technique, commonly used to prepare organic thin films from a solution. In order to achieve high-performance optoelectronic devices, such as solar cells based on spin-coated organic semiconductors, there is a need to control the structure, the morphology and the degree of phase separation of the organic semiconductor.

Printers, cassette recorders, and DVD players are chock full of parts—motors, lights, gears, switches, buttons, pulleys, belts, liquid crystal displays, and speakers—that employ standards-worthy concepts of physics, mathematics, and engineering. It’s undeniably captivating to examine the design of these intricate systems, it’s exciting to bring the components back to life, and it’s fun to get creative building something new.

WebsEdge is an international company specializing in providing educational TV channels at technical conferences. A production crew visited CHESS on January 14, conducting interviews and recording activities here. Through highly skilled editing, the resulting several hours of “footage” was distilled down into a 5-minute video presenting the essence of MacCHESS to the public. We retain the raw recordings for use in future presentations.

Full spatial coherence is highly sought after because as a light source approaches that level of perfection, new x-ray probes and techniques become possible such as coherent diffraction imaging (CDI), x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS), as well as enabling efficient focusing by Fresnel lenses to create diffraction limited beam-waists. One of the simplest ways to start thinking about coherence is to realize that the x-ray beam produced by a single electron passing through an undulator is completely coherent.

Ellipsoid shaped single-bounce glass capillaries fabricated at CHESS have been used as achromatic X-ray focusing optics for various applications at synchrotron beamlines, such as microbeam X-ray fluorescence and tomography, confocal X-ray microscopy, microbeam small-angle X-ray scattering (µSAXS), microbeam high-resolution X-ray diffraction and standing wave technique, high pressure studies with diamond anvil cells, microbeam grazing-incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering (µGIWAXS), full-field transmission X-ray microscopy (TXM), X-ray emission spectroscopy and microcrystallography.