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SSRL Headlines Vol. 1, No. 8  February, 2001

1. John Galayda Named Assistant Director at SLAC for LCLS Program
(contact: Lowell Klaisner, Assistant Director, Technical Division, klaisner@slac.stanford.edu)

On February 26, Keith Hodgson and Ewan Paterson, Associate Directors for the SSRL and SLAC Technical Divisions, announced the appointment of Dr. John N. Galayda as Assistant Director for the Linac Coherent Light Source Program. This is a joint appointment reporting to both Dr. Hodgson and Dr. Paterson. John will begin in this new role at SLAC in April 2001.

John has had a distinguished career in particle accelerators and synchrotron light sources. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "for his key role in the design, construction, and commissioning of the National Synchrotron Light Source and the Advanced Photon Source." He will be leaving Argonne National Laboratory where he has served as the Deputy Associate Laboratory Director for the Advanced Photon Source. John has been active in Argonne's participation in the LCLS program and we all welcome him to SLAC and look forward to his leadership in this exciting endeavor.

2. Unexpected SPEAR Downtime
(contact: Piero Pianetta, Assistant Director, SSRL, pianetta@ssrl.slac.stanford.edu)

As some of our user community is already aware, user operations were brought to an abrupt halt early last Thursday by a Beam Line 10 wiggler failure (a pole piece separated) that resulted in a quadrant of SPEAR being vented. An action plan was quickly defined and as the first part of the recovery effort, rigging crews were brought in to remove concrete roof blocks. This activity was followed by a marathon Thursday-Friday work session by SSRL support staff to remove the wiggler and its vacuum chamber from the storage ring, install and align the drift section in 12S13, and get quadrant III back under vacuum. Various systems were reconnected on Saturday and safety checks run. Bend power supplies were subsequently brought back up and the first attempts to inject beam into SPEAR began Sunday evening. As of Tuesday morning, beam was delivered to the beam lines and some users have been put back on line.

With multiple fills a day, running conditions are not yet optimal, but overall, recovery efforts have either met or exceeded our original best estimates and we are well underway to returning to a full user operations mode. We are making every effort to provide new information to the users who are being directly affected by this unexpected down and appreciate the spirit of cooperation and patience that we have encountered so far as we make adjustments to our running schedule. We are currently assessing options as for BL10 itself which cannot see beam until the wiggler is repaired or replaced and reinstalled. SSRL staff made an extraordinary effort to recover from a very complex situation in a safe and timely manner.

3. Call for Proposals and Scheduling Notes
(contacts: Cathy Knotts, knotts@ssrl.slac.stanford.edu and Lisa Dunn, lisa@ssrl.slac.stanford.edu)

The spring 2001 deadlines for submission of beam time proposals are fast approaching. New proposals and renewal applications for Macromolecular Crystallography are due April 1. X-ray and VUV proposals are due on May 1.

More information about proposal submissions can be obtained at:
http://www-ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/call-for-proposals.html

Kudos to SSRL users for getting their X-ray/VUV beam time requests to us so promptly (FYI-they were due on February 23rd). The schedule should be available within the next week or two.

4. SPEAR3 Progress and DOE Reviews
(contact: Tom Elioff, SPEAR3 Project Director, telioff@slac.stanford.edu)

The DOE Office of Science held a Mini-Lehman Review of the SPEAR3 Upgrade Project on February 9, 2001. Jim Carney of the DOE Construction Management Support Division chaired the review which was conducted by video conference between Headquarters and SLAC with SPEAR3 staff and SLAC DOE Site Office participating. While the SPEAR3 project is classified as a major item of equipment (MIE), it is managed as a line item construction project because of the size and complexity of the upgrade.

The review committee report noted that "SPEAR3 technical systems have continued to make good progress in design and procurement". The Committee did not find any major issues. On a very encouraging note the Committee also commented that "Management of the project continues to be excellent. The project team has executed the project effectively by resolving technical issues and managing priorities". Overall, the project remains on schedule and within budget and will meet the planned major shutdown of installation to begin in April, 2003.

Additional comments regarding technical systems and the SPEAR3 Quarterly Report are available at:

http://www-ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/spear3/Feb01-LehmanReview.html
http://www-ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/spear3/spear3_qReport6.html

5. Beam Line 11-2 Passes Major Milestone
(contact: John Bargar, bargar@ssrl.slac.stanford.edu)

We have begun to "ring out" SSRL's new high-flux XAS beam line on bona fide XAS experiments. These experiments are being interspersed with instrumentation installations, upgrades and commissioning measurements. Assuming that these commissioning activities continue to progress as expected, BL11-2 should be fully available for users beginning in May or June.

A major milestone was reached on February 14, when the first XAS scans on a transuranic actinide (americium) sample were conducted. The ability to routinely accommodate radiologic samples under conditions engineered for high levels of safety to the SSRL community was a major goal of BL11-2. The engineered controls and monitoring concepts were designed with interlaboratory participation from groups at LANL, LBNL, and PNNL.

6. SSRL Faculty/Sr. Staff Retreat
(contact: Gordon Brown, SSRL Faculty Chair, gordon@pangea.stanford.edu)

The SSRL Division of the SLAC Faculty at Stanford University held a retreat on February 15, 2001 at the Quadrus Conference Center in Menlo Park, CA to plan for SSRL's future and to meet with the Dean of the SLAC Faculty (SLAC Director Jonathan Dorfan) and the President of Stanford University (John Hennessy). In attendance for the morning session were sixteen SSRL faculty. At lunch they were joined by three emeritus SSRL faculty, four SSRL courtesy faculty (from other Stanford departments), two consulting faculty (David Clark from LANL and Joe Wong from LLNL), and ten senior SSRL scientific and technical staff members.

Discussions included (1) future plans for SLAC led by Jonathan Dorfan; (2) new scientific opportunities for SSRL, including the national initiatives in nanoscience and human genomics and proteomics, the new Stanford initiative in materials research, and the proposed Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC; and (3) how the current SSRL Faculty maps onto these opportunities. The group was joined in the afternoon by President Hennessy who discussed the relationship between SLAC and the Stanford campus, the importance of continuing to build strong intellectual bridges between the University and SLAC through the SLAC faculty, and possible new funding opportunities that may impact both the University and SSRL. Also discussed during the afternoon session were the SPEAR3 project, the LCLS project, and SLAC User Lodging (the latter being built by Stanford). The retreat was enjoyed by all who attended and was a very useful planning exercise for the near-term future of SSRL.

7. ALS and SSRL Hold Meeting on Cooperation
(contact: Keith Hodgson, SSRL Director,
hodgson@SSRL.Slac.Stanford.Edu)

Representatives of the ALS and SSRL scientific, technical and management staff met at SSRL on Wednesday, February 14. This was the second of a new series of periodic meetings that have been established to discuss coordination and cooperation between our two neighboring light sources. A number of topics were covered at this meeting. For example, efforts will be made to coordinate scheduled installation shutdowns of the two facilities in an attempt to ensure the uninterrupted availability of synchrotron light to researchers on the West Coast. Other topics included further planning for the upcoming SRI meeting to be jointly hosted by ALS and SSRL in San Francisco in 2003, opportunities for new detector development, and technical/scientific resources and management in areas of molecular environmental science, highly correlated materials, and macromolecular crystallography. A number of action items were identified and will be followed up on prior to the next meeting in the summer. It is our joint goal to provide the best capabilities to our user communities and coordinate efforts in ways which will be most beneficial in enabling new science.

8. Visit by Officials from University of Saskatchewan
(contact: Gordon Brown, SSRL Faculty Chair, gordon@pangea.stanford.edu)

SSRL was visited by a delegation of Canadian officials on February 16, 2001, including University of Saskatchewan President Peter McKinnon, Vice President (Academic) Michael Atkinson, and Vice President (Finance and Resources) Anthony Whitworth, and Dr. Michael Bancroft, Director of the Canadian Light Source (CLS). Also in attendance was Dr. Charles Kruger, Vice Provost and Dean of Research and Graduate Policy at Stanford University. The Canadian Light Source, the first synchrotron radiation source to be built in Canada, is being modeled, in part, after SSRL, and will include approximately 20 beam lines, when completed, which will be used for both fundamental and applied research. The purposes of the visit were to discuss the role of the SSRL Faculty in the success of SSRL and the possibility of forming a CLS Faculty at the University of Saskatchewan. SSRL Director Keith Hodgson provided a technical and financial overview of SSRL and discussed the SSRL user community, and SSRL Faculty Chair Gordon Brown discussed the history and role of the SSRL Faculty at SSRL. Many questions concerning the relationship between SSRL and Stanford University were asked by the Canadian delegation. The importance of faculty leaders in building key research areas at SSRL was stressed by Brown and Hodgson. The meeting concluded with a tour of SSRL facilities and a painful visit to the dentist by Gordon Brown (my mouth is still sore!).

SSRL Headlines is published electronically monthly to inform SSRL users, sponsors and other interested people about happenings at SSRL. SSRL is a national synchrotron user facility operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences. Additional support for the structural biology program is provided by the DOE Office of Biological and Environmental Research, the NIH National Center for Research Resources and the NIH Institute for General Medical Sciences. Additional information about SSRL and its operation and schedules is available from the SSRL WWW site: http://www-ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/

You can subscribe or remove your name from the distribution list by sending a brief email with your request to Lisa Dunn, editor, at lisa@ssrl.slac.stanford.edu.

 

	Last Updated:	26 MAR 2001
	Content Owner:	L. Dunn
	Page Editor:	L. Dunn