Impacting the Economy

There are over twenty manufacturing companies from the Southern tier that have helped to manufacture different components of CHESS-U.  This work has allowed companies like ADC and other local manufacturing companies to expand their product offerings to other facilities in the US and around the world, thereby creating even more manufacturing jobs than those created by the CHESS upgrade.

For example, since ADC delivered two lead hutches to CHESS-U (a new product for ADC) the company has received RFPs from Brazilian Synchrotron for 24 hutches with potential revenue of over $36M, Argonne National Lab for 8 hutches with potential revenue over $5M, and the Australian Synchrotron for 6 New Beam Lines, with potential revenue over $12M. 

The New York State Funding of CHESS-U will create many solid engineering and advanced manufacturing jobs for Upstate New York. These are well paid high technology jobs producing some of the highest technology found in the world.

When CHESS receives support such as this, New York State makes a direct investment in the creation of advanced manufacturing jobs in upstate New York. Companies such as ADC and over twenty other manufacturing companies from Binghamton to Rochester have benefited from this funding. New York State funding benefits not only CHESS but allows local companies to increase our product offerings and experience resulting in the  creation of new high-end jobs allowing us to become more competitive in the world market.

CHESS requires state-of-the-art synchrotron radiation instruments for research in physics, chemistry, biology and environmental and materials sciences, to remain competitive in the world-wide research market. New York State investment in CHESS has had a direct impact on companies’ abilities to develop new products, testing them and selling them, in this same worldwide market.  New York State funding has directly contributed to solid growth at companies like ADC by creating many new engineering, advanced manufacturing, and assembly jobs.

The scientists and engineers at CHESS and in the accelerator physics and superconducting radio-frequency groups are designing, building, and testing novel state-of-the-art technologies that will push forward the capabilities for x-ray science in all disciplines.

A recent collaboration with KYMA resulted in the design and fabrication of custom-made compact undulators (CCU) that are only 150 cm long and do not need an expensive high-precision mechanical frame. Two CCU are installed in the West flare, currently feeding both the A-line and G-line experimental stations. These undulators made CHESS the 5th 3rd generation (undulator operations) high-energy storage ring (energy of 5.3 GeV) synchrotron in the world. A variety of optics options are employed at CHESS: diamond monochromators for undulator beamlines, high-resolution Si monochromators for spectroscopy, as well as wide-bandpass multilayers to high-flux experiments. In addition to commercially-sourced x-ray detectors, the fabrication and prototyping of new advanced detectors has always been a strength of CHESS. X-ray optics are an area where CHESS excels. CHESS has an in-house glass drawing tower to fabricate custom designs of capillary x-ray optics, many with focal spots below 10 microns. For additional focusing possibilities, spoked channel arrays, lithographically fabricated by etching silicon to form channels with a fan-shape arrangement, are being developed at CHESS to continue to improve the range and quality of experiments possible at the beamlines.