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.

As support for CHESS shifts from NSF to include other partners, CHESS will evolve from a general user facility to a facility supporting the partners’ research programs.  This will necessarily entail a shift in CHESS’s user community and programmatic focus.  Nevertheless, there are aspects of CHESS that will always remain intact: 

Nimbleness: Over and over again, CHESS has demonstrated the ability to respond quickly to opportunities and challenges.  By way of example, it typically takes CHESS 12-18 months – from concept to commissioning – to rebuild and upgrade an x-ray beamline and restore it fully to user operations.

Cost Effectiveness: The typical cost for CHESS to upgrade an x-ray beamline (including insertion device and x-ray optics) ranges from $1M to $2M. 

Innovation: CHESS has a long tradition of inventing and developing novel technologies and techniques which then find wide adoption in the international synchrotron community. Recent examples developed under the current CHESS award include: the high performance, cost-effective Cornell Compact Undulator (a variant known as the “after burner” produces circular and elliptically polarized x-ray beams at the LCLS enabling studies of magnetism); the lithographically fabricated Cornell Collimating Arrays which enable non-destructive, 3D x-ray fluorescence imaging and are in use at APS, CLS, and PETRA-III; and, the user-friendly and popular RAW suite of programs which support data processing and analysis for BioSAXS has been downloaded over 4000 times in 2017. 

User Service: A consistent refrain from CHESS users is their deep appreciation for what they call “The CHESS experience.” In practice this means consistent and in-depth interactions between users and CHESS scientists and technical staff beginning in the pre-proposal stage and extending through experimental development, data collection, analysis, and interpretation. This is equally valuable to novice users, to users from non-traditional synchrotron disciplines, and to expert users working on novel experiments.

New Users: CHESS has a demonstrated track record of developing both entirely new scientific communities using synchrotron x-rays (recent examples include Structural materials, BioSAXS and Plantphenotyping) and novice users within scientific disciplines with well-established synchrotron communities.

At the completion of CHESS-U in 2018, CHESS will be the premier synchrotron source in the US for high-energy, high-flux x-ray studies.

High Flux + High Energy = High Penetration

High-energy x-rays (20-150keV) have a wavelength short enough that diffraction can determine the distance between atoms and energy well above electron binding energies, minimizing photoelectric absorption and enhancing penetration. These characteristics are key requirement for in-situ and operando studies of materials at the macroscopic level. The horizontal emittance of the ribbon shaped beam created in CHESS-U will be ~30 nanometers, allowing users to perform experiments like never before!

This upgrade will enable new scientific capabilities at CHESS including enhanced microspectroscopy for a variety of life sciences, improved time-resolved XRD for both metallurgical metals/alloys as well as fundamental studies into strongly correlated materials.

Flexibility for the Future

CHESS plays a leading role in development of innovative instrumentation in support of first- and best-of-class experiments. CHESS-U will provide even more undulator beamtime availability for individual user groups to develop new instruments, new techniques, and new applications for synchrotron radiation.

Internationally, it is becoming harder and harder for students (undergraduate, graduate) to actively get "behind the shield wall," CHESS welcomes students to actively participate in the design and assembly of their experiments. This approach introduces a new generation of synchrotron scientists that will greatly impact the world of physics.

Bring CHESS Your Toughest Questions

The ability to perform x-ray microscopy in the 20-100 keV regime with the speed, sensitivity, and versatility of CHESS-U opens up new possibilities for research and development. Working alongside industrial and research partners, there are questions that CHESS hopes to answer with the high energy x-rays available with the upgrade:

1. Sustainable development: How can synchrotron radiation help us detect, understand, and ultimately utilize our natural resources more efficiently and responsibly?
2. Natural/environmental history: What aspects of natural history do we remain blind to for lack of adequate detection limits, resolution, or field of view?
3. Trace-elements for medical imaging: What information about nutrients, toxins, and radiological tracers are we missing for lack of adequate sensitivity, e.g. at the parts per million (ppm) level?
4. Sustainable energy: How can we routinely observe the physical and chemical transformations inside energy-related devices?
5. Cultural heritage: How do we extract information from, understand, and preserve cultural heritage artifacts?