U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, will be at the Wilson Lab in the CHESS facility from 2:30 to 3:15 p.m. today as part of his visit, Schumer plans to offer remarks and take questions from the media, according to a Cornell University advisory.

Rep. Tom Reed, R-Corning, will be touring the CHESS lab from as well as the Cornell Electron Storage Ring as part of his visit with leaders of the Cornell Lab for Accelerator-based Science and Education from 10-11:30 a.m. Tuesday.

The money will ensure the lab operations continue for the next five years.

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, announced that the NSF grant had been renewed Monday while visiting the Wilson Lab in the CHESS facility, which is one of five high-energy synchrotron x-ray sources in the world and one of only two in the United States. It provides synchrotron x-ray capabilities to investigators in all fields of science and engineering.

The funds will allow CHESS to continue the development of experimental techniques using high-energy Xray beams, which have applications in fields such as medicine and aerospace engineering, according to a University press release.

Currently, CHESS receives 20 percent of its funding from the NSF, according to Schumer.

President David Skorton, who introduced the senator, emphasized Schumer’s efforts to maintain and increase funding for several agencies — including the Department of Energy and the NSF.

CHESS has received its requested grant renewal of up to $100 million over five years, securing the national X-ray facility’s near-term future.

“To be funded in the current economic climate is the best you could possibly hope for,” said Joel Brock, CHESS director and professor of applied and engineering physics. “We’re absolutely thrilled, and it’s a real testament to the quality of the staff here – their hard work, creativity and unique capabilities.”

Tom Reed was in Ithaca Tuesday at Cornell University to meet with professors for a tour of the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Light Source (CHESS) lab and the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, both supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) funding Reed secured for the lab. Most recently, Reed worked to secure $100 million to fund the CHESS Lab on a long-term basis.

During the almost 90-minute visit, Reed held a series of question and answer sessions with managers, researchers and staff.

Among many topics, Reed learned about the history of the facility, talked with engineers who use X-rays to study the atomic origins of failures in metal structures, and learned how researchers are developing a highly energy efficient, prototype high energy, highly focused linear electron beam accelerator.

This suggests a fundamental connection between superconductivity and fluctuations in some other order parameter.

The VBPMs great advantage over the traditional white beam monitors is that they provide simultaneously beam position, profile full-width half maximum (FWHM) and intensity information about the beam. The fact that the beam can also be observed visually make the beam setup/alignment procedure much faster and easier.

Diamond VBPMs now operate at A, C, D, F3 and G2 beam lines along with Helium luminescence and X-ray scatter based VBPMs.

Instead of watching Saturday morning cartoons, these students got out of bed early to come to Cornell University to learn about how light can be focused and used for scientific experiments. In addition to creating edge-lit cards by carving scraps of plexiglass material and hooking up LED's to button-batteries, kids took a tour of the CHESS experimental hutches. They peered into a microscope to view samples of crystalized proteins and learned how light from the accelerator is captured to produce extraordinary images of tiny structures.

A classic example of such a molecule is TIPS-pentacene with a pentacene backbone and two bulky tri-isopropyl silyl ethynyl (TIPS) side groups that render the molecule soluble in toluene. A feature of this class of materials is low lattice symmetry and polymorphism, i.e., depending on the crystallization conditions, different crystal structures and types of molecular packing may form. The distance between the p-orbitals is all-important for device performance - the closer the better.