From the Director
As you may be aware we will resume user operations soon. Our summer shutdown
was shortened by a few weeks and some of our beam lines will start coming
online in mid October. In addition to our usual winter break (December 22
to January 8) two separate week-long shutdowns are planned for late February
and late May.
Despite the shorter shutdown period, much has been accomplished toward
facility and instrumentation developments and improvements over the past couple
of months. A decision was made several years ago to replace the
legacy RF system in the booster due to reliability concerns, primarily because
there was no cost effective way to replace aging klystrons that were designed
and built in 1975. The new solid state amplifier (SSA) system was tested
out over hundreds of hours during the past year and a major milestone was
achieved earlier this month when beam was established in the booster using the
solid state amplifier instead of the klystron. SSA is now the production RF
system for the booster.
Work progressed on several new beam lines including BL12-1
(micro-beam macromolecular crystallography), BL15-2 (spectroscopy XES-RIXS-XRS
- time resolved), BL16-1/2 (metrology) and BL17-2 (energy sciences materials
scattering). The mini shutdowns in February and May are timed to
accommodate implementations requiring in-alcove work while SPEAR is shut
down.
I look forward to seeing users on our experimental floor again!
Science Highlights
Structure of the Human Cysteine Desulfurase Complex –
Contact: David Barondeau, Texas A&M University
Iron-sulfur (Fe-S) clusters are cofactors that are required for the function
of proteins in many critical cellular processes. All living organisms
synthesize and distribute Fe-S clusters using complex biosynthetic pathways. In
humans, the mitochondrial cysteine desulfurase, NFS1, is responsible for the
conversion of the sulfur-containing amino acid, cysteine, to alanine and
persulfide sulfur, an intermediate in Fe-S cluster synthesis. In contrast to
the analogous cysteine desulfurase in prokaryotes, the eukaryotic NFS1 enzyme
requires accessory proteins, ISD11 and ACP, for its function. A team of
scientists investigated the structure of the NFS1-ISD11-ACP complex in order to
unravel NFS1’s requirement of ISD11 and ACP for function. Read more...
Citation: Cory et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (2017), doi:
10.1073/pnas.1702849114.
Operando Spectroscopic Microscopy of LiCoO2
Cathodes Outside Standard Operating Potentials –
Contact: Johanna Nelson Weker, SSRL
Given our increasing dependence of rechargeable battery containing
electronic devices, including electric cars, it is important to engineer these
systems to mitigate potential for catastrophic battery failure. One possible
source of lithium ion battery failure is over-discharge (over-lithiation) of
the cathode, which can permanently damage the battery. Electronic battery
management systems are programmed to prevent and identify such failures, but
sometimes do not catch problems of over-lithiation when they occur. To better
understand the characteristics of battery failure from over-discharging, a team
of scientists studied the chemical and morphological changes that occur from
over-lithiation of a lithium battery cathode. Read more...
Citation: Nelson Weker et al., Electrochim. Acta (2017), doi:
10.1016/j.e
lectacta.2017.06.173
Awards and Honors
Hewlett Packard’s Suhas Kumar Wins 2017 Klein
Award
Excerpted from September 11, 2017 SLAC News Feature by Manuel
Gnida
|
 |
| Suhas Kumar (HPE) (Rebecca
Lewington/Hewlett Packard Enterprise) |
Suhas Kumar, a postdoctoral researcher at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE),
wants to develop next-generation information storage devices and better
computers. His particular interest is a new type of electronic device, called a
memristor, that could make future computer memories faster, more durable and
more energy efficient than today’s flash memory.
Now, his work has been recognized with the 2017 Melvin P. Klein Scientific
Development Award. Based on experiments at SSRL and elsewhere, he and his
colleagues succeeded in explaining how memristors work on the atomic level,
which is a crucial step toward commercializing these devices.
Memristors typically consist of a piece of transition metal oxide sandwiched
between two electrodes. Applying a voltage pulse to the electrodes switches the
device from low to high electrical conductivity or vice versa. The two states
represent the two values of a “bit,” the basic unit of information
in digital computing. Since no external power inputs are needed to keep the
device in a switched state, it is suitable for use as
“non-volatile” computer memory and could become an alternative for
flash memory. Until recently, details of what exactly happens inside memristor
materials were controversial. Read more...
Summer Internships
From Science to Finance: SLAC Summer Interns Forge New Paths in
STEM
Excerpted from September 21, 2017 SLAC News Feature by Angela Anderson
and Miyuki Dougherty
|
 |
| Sabine Hollatz, left, and Anastasiia Makhniaieva, right,
worked on new ways to collect and process data at SLAC's X-ray synchrotron with
their mentor Aina Cohen, center. (Dawn Harmer/SLAC) |
This summer more than 100 interns worked on a wide variety of projects
across SLAC. The students come to the lab each summer through a variety of
department-hosted internships and educational outreach programs, including the
DOE’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program, which
provides research experience for undergraduate students exploring careers in
science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM. Summer internships
for high school students started at SLAC in 1969.
Other interns come to the lab via the DOE’s Community College
Internships program, California Polytechnic State University's STEM Teacher
and Researcher, and Stanford's Raising Interest in Science and Engineering
programs. The LCLS Internship Program, now in its seventh year, hosted more
than 40 interns in various fields of science and engineering, as well as
science communications and business administration.
A number of interns were mentored by SSRL staff through these various
programs, 12 of whom took part in Structural Molecular Biology (SMB) projects
to advance various stages of macromolecular crystallography experiments from
sample preparation, data collection and data analysis. Read more...
Upcoming Events
Synchrotron Radiation Instrumentation (SRI 2018), June 10-15, 2018,
Taiwan
Save the date for the 13th International Conference on Synchrotron Radiation
Instrumentation (SRI 2018) to be hosted by the National Synchrotron Radiation
Research Center (NSRRC), at the Taipei International Convention Center (TICC),
June 10-15, 2018. Conference website
Announcements
Call for User Publications, Theses, Awards, Patents
Please let us know about all publications, theses, awards, patents and other
forms of recognition resulting from research conducted fully or partially at
SSRL. These metrics of scientific achievements and productivity are extremely
important to the facility, and to our funding agencies. Remember to
acknowledge SSRL in ALL publications resulting from use of SSRL beam lines.
This acknowledgement of SSRL is relevant even when final results are obtained
at other facilities. If SSRL is not acknowledged in your paper or supplementary
material, we are not able to include it on our list or report it to our funding
agencies. Your assistance is essential to help us to meet our mission
requirements, including assessment and reporting. More information is available
on our publications page.
2018 Panofsky Fellowship Applications due December 1,
2017
The Panofsky Fellowship honors SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's
founder and first Director, Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky. It is intended to
recognize exceptional and promising young scientists who would most benefit
from the unique opportunity to conduct their research at SLAC.
The Fellowship celebrates W. K. H. Panofsky's breadth of activities and
is awarded without regard to a candidate's particular specialty within our
programs. While an emphasis will be placed on the potential for
innovation and growth of new opportunities as their career develops, the
candidate's research plan should relate to one or more areas within the
general scope of the science program at SLAC:
- Accelerator science & advanced accelerator research
- Applied energy research
- Biosciences
- Chemical science
- Computer science
- Elementary particle physics
- High energy density matter
- Material science
- Particle astrophysics and cosmology
- X-ray science including ultrafast and advanced x-ray
instrumentation at LCLS and SSRL
Read more for application process
User Research Administration
SSRL Beam Time Request Deadlines
- November 8, 2017 – X-ray/VUV requests for February-April
2018
SSRL Proposal Deadlines
- December 1, 2017 – X-ray/VUV and Macromolecular Crystallography
Submit proposals and beam time requests through the User Portal.
The Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) is a third-generation
light source producing extremely bright x-rays for basic and applied
research. SSRL attracts and supports scientists from around the world who
use its state-of-the-art capabilities to make discoveries that benefit society.
SSRL, a U.S. DOE Office of Science national user facility, is a Directorate of
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, operated by Stanford University for the
U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The SSRL Structural
Molecular Biology Program is supported by the DOE Office of Biological and
Environmental Research, and by the National Institutes of Health, National
Institute of General Medical Sciences. For more information about SSRL science,
operations and schedules, visit http://www-ssrl.slac.stanford.edu.
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Questions? Comments? Contact Lisa Dunn
