A group from Argonne National Lab is capturing a flood of data using the huge Pilatus3 6M detector, rotating crystal samples at slow speed while continuously (~10Hz) measuring diffraction of high energy (57 keV) x-rays in shutterless operation.

The results are literally a gigabyte of data approximately every 4 seconds (14 GB per minute) or several terabytes per day and at the end of their run could easily reach 30 Terabytes.

Early pioneers in the now-popular "Maker Movement", we are familiar with the positive impact that this type of project based learning can have on both attitudes toward science, and self efficacy in science.

One of the highest-stakes applications is the area of solar cells, where reliable operation depends upon developing stable and energetically suitable hole transporting buffer layers in tune with the electrode and photoactive materials of the solar cell stack.

Conventional methods use liquid nitrogen to cool the protein crystals (with cryoprotectants) so that low-density amorphous (LDA) ice, rather than crystalline ice, forms. Kim et al. developed a procedure known as high-pressure cryo-cooling that uses high-pressure on protein crystals to form high-density amorphous (HDA) ice instead [1].

While the foundational physics of scattering is common to all application areas, individual fields have diverged over the years to develop many specialized tools appropriate to the type of matter under investigation. As science advances, however, areas like structural biology, materials science, and engineering have greater overlap. We organized a dual-track workshop this year aimed at getting soft-matter scientists and biologists in one room to promote exchange.

In a new article published in Advanced Functional Materials (http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adfm.201502412), Princeton Ph.D. candidate Geoff Purdum in Lynn Loo’s group in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at Princeton and his co-authors shed new light on this issue. In particular, they report reversible access of two polymorphs exhibited by core-chlorinated naphthalene tetracarboxylic diimide (NTCDI-1), an organic semiconductor developed by BASF.

CHESS is a high-intensity x-ray source funded by the National Science Foundation that is operated and managed by the University, driving research in fields spanning from electron behavior in a superconductor to arsenic poisoning in shrimp.

Nine educators and 85 students grades 3-8th from Syracuse, Tully, South Seneca, Interlaken and Ithaca were engaged in science learning through experience and exploration. Awesome!!!

Both the instrumental and analytical developments were led by Staff scientist Zhongwu Wang at Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS). This first-of-the-kind X-ray approach together with the growth of single supercrystal and detailed structural analysis and simulation from atomic to mesoscale level was reported in Issue September 09, 2015 at Nano Letters [1].

Dichtel, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University, has made continuous use of CHESS over the past few years to aid his group’s studies of covalent organic frameworks (COFs). The group regularly relies on the G2 station at CHESS to characterize the crystalline and orientational order of different COFs and under different conditions [1-3], including different substrates such as single-layer graphene. Those results have contributed to the group’s development of COFs for various applications, such as vapor detection [4].