From the Director _______________________________________
It has been a busy summer, capped off with a great Users' Conference last week. Thank you to everyone who helped to organize
or participate in the many sessions and discussions.
We are preparing to restart SPEAR and resume user operations on most beam lines in late October. As mentioned previously, we
are also working to bring up several new beam lines including BL12-1 (micro-beam macromolecular crystallography), BL15-2
(spectroscopy XES-RIXS-XRS - time resolved), BL16-1/2 (metrology) and later BL17-2 (energy sciences materials scattering).
I look forward to seeing users on our experimental floor again!
Science
Highlight ________________________________________
Gold Nanoparticle Biodissolution by a Freshwater Macrophyte and Its Associated Microbiome
– Contact: Greg Lowry, Carnegie Mellon University
Nanotechnology, which focuses on materials that measure between 1 and 100 nanometers in at least one dimension, is being
applied to diverse areas of research including medicine, electronics, and biology. Yet it is unclear how these engineered
nanomaterials might interact with and affect environments and ecosystems. Read more…
SSRL-Related News _______________________________________
2018 SSRL/LCLS Users' Meeting
About 470 researchers gathered for our Annual SSRL/LCLS Users' Meeting Sept. 25-28 to attend talks and poster
sessions, participate in workshops, and engage in discussions involving the lab’s x-ray light sources. Harriet Kung led
off the Thursday, September 27 plenary session with an update from the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences. LCLS Director
Mike Dunne and SSRL Director Kelly Gaffney followed with facility updates. Eric K. Lin (NIST), Junko Yano (LBNL), David
Reis (Stanford PULSE and SIMES Institutes), and Peter Weber (Brown University) gave the invited plenary talks.
Another
highlight of the meeting was the presentation of the LCLS
Young Investigator Award, William
E. and Diane M. Spicer Young Investigator Award, Melvin P. Klein Scientific Development Award and Farrel W. Lytle Award. The 2018 meeting organizers were Arianna Gleason of Stanford, vice chair of
the LCLS Users’ Executive Committee; Graham George of the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, vice chair of the SSRL
Users’ Executive Committee; and SLAC scientists Sergio Carbajo and Kevin Stone. Click here to
read more and view the slideshow.
How SLAC's 'Electronics Artists' Enable Cutting-Edge Science
Excerpt from August 23, 2018 SLAC Today article by Manuel Gnida
A team of electrical designers are developing specialized microchips for a broad range of scientific applications, including
x-ray science and particle physics, made possible in part through x-ray applications at SSRL. Read more...
Winning Photos from the 2018 SLAC Physics Photowalk
The SLAC Photowalk took a group of photographers, both amateur and professional, behind the scenes to photograph SLAC's
world-class science facilities, including LCLS and SSRL. The three winning photos competed in the Global Physics Photowalk
against photos taken at other big scientific labs around the world. Read more...
Honors and Awards
_______________________________________
Graham George Receives Lytle Award for Contributions to X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy
Excerpt from September 11, 2018 SLAC Today article by Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci
During the Users' Conference, Graham Neil George, Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Saskatchewan,
received the 2018 Farrel W. Lytle Award for his outstanding contributions to synchrotron science at SSRL. George has been
associated with SSRL since 1983 – as a user, postdoctoral fellow, visiting scholar, physicist, and most recently as a
laboratory affiliate during a sabbatical in 2015. He is an active SSRL user and serves as vice chair of the SSRL Users
Executive Committee. He has taken part in over 185 different experimental runs at SSRL and published more than 249 papers
based on SSRL data, which collectively have been cited nearly 12,000 times (source: Scopus). Read more...
Joe Wong Outstanding Poster Awards
Congratulations to the recipients of the 2018 Joe Wong Outstanding Poster Award Competition at the SSRL/LCLS Annual
Users’ Meeting on September 27, 2018!
These awards are made possible by support from longtime SSRL user, Joe Wong, Ph.D., D.Sc., Fellow of the American Physical
Society, and are given to the most exciting, novel, and compelling science as presented during the poster session at the
SSRL/LCLS Annual Users’ Meeting.
Thank you very much to all of the judges!
Upcoming Events and Courses _______________________________
- Advanced X-ray Methods and Instrumentation for LCLS-II-HE
Science: October 16-17, 2018, SLAC
The specific purpose of this workshop is to further engage the science
community in helping to identify the most compelling X-ray methods and
instrumentation that will exploit the unique capabilities of LCLS-II-HE for the
greatest scientific impact. The outcome from this workshop will help guide
planning for new instruments for LCLS-II-HE. Workshop website
- Advanced Light Source – 6th International DLSR
Workshop: October 29-31, 2018, LBNL Workshop website
- U.S. Particle Accelerator School (USPAS) – Winter
2019 Session: January 21 – February 1, 2019
Course description website
Announcements
__________________________________________
Changes at SLACafé
SLACafé is now open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., Monday through Friday (except holidays). Although the daily hot
breakfast menu is no longer available, you can still grab pre-made breakfast options from 8 a.m. every morning.
The SLACafé also reports that they will be offering lower prices for hot food and the salad bar at 69 cents per
ounce, plus hot soup for $3.95, effective October 1. The new weekly Chef’s Special, value combos, and a new
selection of cold beverages and desserts are still being offered daily.
Food menu options and service times:
8 a.m. to 3 p.m. - Grab N Go items, including pre-packaged breakfast sandwiches
11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. - Hot food, soup, grill items, salad bar
Check the weekly menu on the SLACafé website.
Visitors staying at the Stanford Guest House are offered complimentary breakfast, and Starbucks also provides breakfast
options to both staff and guests. Breakfast catering will still be available upon request, with the full menu on offer.
Vending Machine Update
You may have noticed that the Pepsi vending machines were removed. The new contract has been awarded to Coca-Cola, and we
expect new vending machines to be installed and stocked with products soon.
New Electric Vehicle Charging Stations
SLAC is enhancing the network of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in various parking lots, including:
- Eight 208-volt chargers will be installed in the Building 950 parking lot. The site is being designed for future
expansion to eventually support up to 22 chargers.
- Four existing ChargePoint chargers at the Building 41 parking lot will be removed and replaced with 16 PowerFlex
chargers in October.
- Four new ChargePoint chargers will be added at the Arriaga Science Center (ASC) parking lot in October.
- The six existing ChargePoint chargers in the Building 53 (SUSB) parking lot will remain.
Usage fees have increased from 7 cents per kilowatt-hour to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour to partially reimburse network
maintenance.
User Research Administration
_______________________________
Run Schedule Update
The beam time schedule for
the October 2018-January 2019 run cycle is posted. To date, we have been able
to accommodate 505 out of 805 requests for beam time (~63%).
Many factors are considered in scheduling SSRL beam time. Priority is given to highly rated proposals, while also
considering the amount of beam time that has previously been allocated as well as the proposal team's demonstrated
productivity (publications). Other factors are availability of both equipment and beam line staff. Experiments
with similar equipment configuration set ups are scheduled together whenever feasible for maximum efficiency and to minimize
downtime. A rating of ~1.45 is generally the initial cutoff for beam time on most oversubscribed SSRL beam
lines. Additional requests are kept in the queue and may be accommodated to fill cancelled beam time.
If members of the same research team have several proposals, they will not necessarily be granted beam time for each
proposals or request in each scheduling period. Many SSRL beam lines are oversubscribed with highly rated proposals;
consequently, requests for the most oversubscribed beam lines will likely be limited to one or two experiments per research
group per run cycle or run year, depending on the specific beam line availability.
Call for User Publications and Reminder to Acknowledge SSRL and Funding Agencies
Publications are an important metric of productivity, and we need your help to keep up-to-date publication listings for
all peer-reviewed journal papers, book chapters, conference proceedings and theses based on work conducted here – this
allows us to demonstrate the scientific achievements and productivity of SSRL and our user community.
After data have been collected, analyzed and prepared for publication, inform us and acknowledge us and our funding
agencies in each publication using the formats posted on the our website.
It is extremely important that you contact us before exciting results are about to be published so that we can work with
you, your institution and the SLAC Office of Communication to track publications related to the user facility, to develop
science highlights and to communicate the latest research findings to a broader audience including funding agencies.
User science highlights, as well as other news and announcements, are featured on our website and in our electronic newsletter.
SSRL Beam Time Request Deadline
- November 3, 2018 – X-ray / VUV (February – April 2019 scheduling)
SSRL Proposal Deadline
- November 1, 2018 – X-ray / VUV (for beam time eligibility beginning in May 2019)
- December 1, 2018 – Macromolecular Crystallography
See SSRL Proposal & Scheduling Guidelines and 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 Tomoko Nakai or
Lisa Dunn
