Since the 1970s, scientists have known that copper has a special ability to recycle carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals and fuels. But for many years, scientists have struggled to understand how this common metal works as an electrocatalyst, a mechanism that uses energy from electrons to chemically transform molecules into different products.
A team of collaborators from the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), Cornell’s College of Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology, Australia’s CSIRO and Industry have been selected to participate in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Convergence Accelerator, a program that supports interdisciplinary research solving societal challenges.
SMB is one of two beamlines at the Materials Solutions Network at CHESS (MSN-C) providing critical infrastructure in support of materials research for the U.S. Department of Defense. SMB is optimized for the study of structural materials – materials that can sustain a load or withstand an impact such as engineering alloys and composites.
Throw in a $28M construction project and a few routine upgrades, and there are bound to be more challenges, particularly unearthing a portion of the storage ring and tapping three new beamline holes into the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, CESR. These three new connections - and the large construction project they accompany - are all part of the New Experimental Hall. This ongoing construction project at Wilson Lab will house the High Magnetic Field Beamline and up to four additional beamlines.
The challenge now is to efficiently use these expensive techniques - and the enormous datasets they produce - to better understand existing problems and gain insight into new phenomena that have been previously unreachable.
CHESS has been at the heart of this explosive growth, and will now develop new, efficient experimental and data processing protocols for using these techniques.
"Drowning in Data"
What is the discovery?
Steve is very interested in structural biology methods that let us see "molecular movies" -- i.e. how molecular machines like enzymes actually work. Diffuse scattering is one such method that he’s worked on with Nozomi Ando's group. But he’s also interested in using time-resolved techniques to include more types of perturbations, such as temperature, pressure, and electric fields.