From the Director
We have reached the end of another successful and exciting year at SSRL and
are entering the winter break of the user run. I am grateful for the
excellent outcome of the triennial DOE review that took place in May. The
review highlighted the strength of the science performed at SSRL and I want to
thank our users and staff for keeping SSRL at the technological
forefront. I look forward to the challenges and opportunities the New
Year will bring and look forward to seeing your return to SSRL in 2018.
On behalf of SSRL, I wish you all a Happy Holidays!
SLAC Power Outage – SSRL Website Down
Due to a planned SLAC power outage related to a new laboratory building
project, the SSRL website and user portal will be down from December 26, 2017
through possibly January 2, 2018. Please accept our apologies for the
inconvenience.
Science Highlight
Finding a Needle in the Haystack: Identification of Functionally
Important Minority Phases in an Operating Battery –
Contacts: Yijin Liu, Apurva Mehta (SSRL), Xiqian Yu (Institute of Physics
Beijing) and Xiao-Qing Yang (BNL)
Batteries are engineered to be efficient enough while balancing other
factors such as cost. This has generated batteries that commonly have side
reactions, both expected and unexpected. Current technology allows scientists
to delve into what reactions and phases are happening within a battery at high
resolution over time. But in using these probes, so much data is generated that
it can be hard to pick out important qualities from noise. Read more...
Citation: Zhang et al., Nano Lett. (2017), doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b03985
SSRL-Related News
Scientists Discover Path to Improving Game-Changing Battery
Electrode
Excerpted from December 12, 2017 SLAC Press Release
If you add more lithium to the positive electrode of a lithium-ion battery
– overstuff it, in a sense – it can store much more charge in
the same amount of space, theoretically powering an electric car 30 to 50
percent farther between charges. But these lithium-rich cathodes quickly lose
voltage, and years of research have not been able to pin down why – until
now.
After looking at the problem from many angles, researchers from Stanford
University, SSRL, ALS and Samsung created a comprehensive picture of how the
same chemical processes that give these cathodes their high capacity are also
linked to changes in atomic structure that sap performance.
“This is good news,” said William E. Gent, a Stanford University
graduate student and Siebel Scholar who led the study. “It gives us a
promising new pathway for optimizing the voltage performance of lithium-rich
cathodes by controlling the way their atomic structure evolves as a battery
charges and discharges.”
Michael Toney, co-head of SSRL's Materials Sciences Division and a
co-author of the paper, added, “It is a huge deal if you can get these
lithium-rich electrodes to work because they would be one of the enablers for
electric cars with a much longer range. There is enormous interest in the
automotive community in developing ways to implement these, and understanding
what the technological barriers are may help us solve the problems that are
holding them back.” Read more...
LIGO Mirror Coatings get an Upgrade with New Stanford-led National
Collaboration
Excerpted from November 9, 2017 Stanford News Article by Vicky Stein
Stanford scientists will lead a new national cooperative effort, the LIGO
Scientific Collaboration Center for Coatings Research, to improve detection of
gravitational waves at the twin LIGO facilities.
The goal of the new center, comprising 10 US institutions and led at
Stanford by Martin Fejer, Professor of Applied Physics, will be to improve
LIGO’s sensitivity with better coatings for its interferometers.
Researchers hope to have new materials ready in time for the next update to the
LIGO facilities in as soon as three years. If they are successful and halve the
amount of thermal noise from the mirror coatings, they could expand the volume
of the universe that LIGO can observe eight times over current
capabilities.
The coatings in question are comprised of multiple layers no larger than a
few hundreds of nanometers in thickness each – hundreds of times thinner
than a human hair. In the past, researchers have followed an iterative process,
creating a new coating and then testing it, hoping to improve on previous
versions.
Through the new center, Stanford will be leading researchers and facilities
across the country in what they hope will be a more targeted approach. For
example, working with collaborators at SSRL, scientists can inspect newly
devised mirror coatings at an atomic level. With this critical mass of funding
and participation, “rather than following this trial-and-error Edisonian
approach, we can come to a materials-by-design process,” said Stanford
researcher Riccardo Bassiri. “Ultimately, the reward of developing better
coatings for LIGO will be to further enable exploration of the universe through
gravitational wave astronomy.”
The Center for Coatings Research is funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore
Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Read more...
Upcoming Events
RapiData 2018 – April 22-27, 2018, Menlo Park, CA
RapiData 2018 at SSRL is a practical course in macromolecular x-ray
diffraction data collection, data processing and structure solution. The aim of
the RapiData course is to educate and train young scientists in data collection
and processing methods at synchrotron beam lines, using state-of-the-art
software and instrumentation.
The course will comprise hands-on experiments at the SSRL beam lines,
software tutorials, and lectures on the following topics:
- Specimen preparation, tactics in data collection
- X-ray light sources
- X-ray detectors
- Data reduction
- Structure solving by MAD, SAD and Molecular replacement
- Complementary methods (spectroscopy and small angle
scattering)
The deadline for applications is December 22, 2017. For more
information and to apply see the course
announcement.
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
50 Years of Synchrotron Radiation in the UK and Its Global Impact
(UKSR50), June 26-29,2018, Liverpool, UK
Save the date for UKSR50 - a conference hosted by the University of
Liverpool to celebrate SR-related achievements over the past 50 years and
explore the future of the light sources (Synchrotrons and FELs) and their
applications in the coming decades. Early Bird registration for the conference
ends 12/31/2017. Conference website
Announcements
UNESCO Proclaims May 16th as the International Day of
Light
The proclamation of this annual International Day will enable global
appreciation of the central role that light and light-based technologies play
in the lives of the citizens of the world in areas of science, technology,
culture, education, and sustainable development. The International Day of Light
is an enduring follow-up to UNESCO’s highly successful International Year
of Light in 2015 that reached over 100 million people in over 140
countries. Learn
more...
User Research Administration
SSRL Beam Time Request Deadlines
- January 18, 2018 – Macromolecular Crystallography requests for
March-May 2018
- February 5, 2018 – X-ray/VUV beam time requests for April-July
2018
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
