Director's Report

- A. Bienenstock

1996 has been a magnificent year for SSRL. Thanks to increased funding from DOE's Scientific Facilities Initiative, the lab was able, for the first time in its history, to operate nearly nine months for synchrotron radiation research. SPEAR was the most reliable and stable that it has ever been, providing 93% of the scheduled beam time to users. A total of 9,444 shifts were used by experimenters. As a consequence, a great deal of excellent research was performed.

Much of the improvement in SPEAR's functioning is due to the major ring and the beam line realignments which took place last summer. A variety of other improvements, plus the increasing skill of the SPEAR operators, were also important.

The construction of Beam Line 9, the structural molecular biology beam line, moved along nicely, with crystallographic station 9-1 being commissioned toward the end of the run. In that process, crystallographic data on a number of proteins were acquired. The beam line should be ready for full commissioning during the first part of the fiscal year 1997 run.

Similarly, development of Beam Line 11, the environmental beam line, progressed steadily and the wiggler is on order. The performance of that line will be enhanced considerably as a result of funds which were also provided by the Facilities Initiative for physical isolation of the experimental station and for advanced detectors.

All in all, the Facilities Initiative had an enormous positive impact on SSRL. I hope that all of you who participated in the educational program in support of the Initiative take pride in what you have achieved. It received bipartisan support in Congress after being proposed as a Presidential Initiative.

Things look even better for the future. We anticipate running a few weeks more in fiscal year 1997 than we did in fiscal year 1996 with increases in both stability and reliability as a result of SPEAR improvements.

In addition, detailed examinations of Helmut Wiedemann's proposal to rebuild SPEAR are encouraging. As a result of that rebuild, SPEAR would have an emittance of 18 nm-rad (presently 118) with a current of 200 mA ( ultimately 500 mA) at 3.0 GeV and relatively long lifetimes. There is now reason to believe that the rebuild could be accomplished with a SPEAR downtime of six months or less at a quite reasonable cost. If anything, the detailed analysis has tended to decrease the anticipated downtime and cost, rather than increasing them.

Similarly, our plans for the Linear Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a 1.5 Å free electron laser have moved along well. There are now active experimental collaborations with Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UCLA. It is quite possible that there will be an experimental verification of the critical single-pass lasing, upon which the LCLS is based, by the end of the calendar year. At the same time, the design study moves ahead and should be completed by the end of August, 1997. SSRL anticipates submitting a proposal in March, 1997, for fiscal year 1999 funding. World interest in x-ray FELs is increasing markedly. FELs featured prominently in an ESRF workshop on 4th generation sources in January and a KEK workshop on coherent radiation in February. In September, a workshop on the scientific uses of x-ray FELs was hosted by DESY.

Despite all the good feelings about SSRL's present operations and excitement about its future, there is one good reason for concern. That is the fiscal year 1998-2000 budget projection for the Office of Energy Research (ER) of the Department of Energy. It shows the ER budget decreasing by approximately 25% over that period. Such a decrease would almost undoubtedly mean the closing of scientific facilities across the board from High Energy Physics through Basic Energy Sciences. It would have an impact on all of American science since so many scientists who are funded by other agencies use these facilities.

There is good reason to believe, however, that this projection is actually a result of an oversight which will be corrected. The many letters (about 3,000) sent to President Clinton by U.S. scientists have focused attention on this matter and may very well lead to a correction. If that is the case, we can look forward to exciting science in the coming years.

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