National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) 2009 Activity Report

2009 was an incredibly exciting year for light sources at Brookhaven. The National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) hosted more than 2,200 visiting researchers, who, along with the about 50 members of our scientific staff, produced a total of 957 publications - about 20 percent of which appeared in premier journals. Covering topics ranging from Alzheimer's disease detection to ethanol-powered fuel cells, a sampling of these findings can be found in this Activity Report. We've also seen the resurfacing of some of our long-time users hard work. I was very proud to hear that two of the three recipients of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry have ties to the NSLS. Venki Ramakrishnan, a former employee in Brookhaven's biology department and long-time user of the NSLS, now at Cambridge University, and Thomas A. Steitz of Yale University, also a long-time NSLS user, shared the prize with Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science for their work on the structure and function of the ribosome. In the late 1990s, Ramakrishnan and Steitz used protein crystallography at the NSLS to gather atomic-level images of two ribosome subunits: 30S (Ramakrishnan) and 50S (Steitz). Both laureates solved the high-resolution structures for these subunits based on this data. After struggling with a rough budget for several years, we received excellent funding, and then some, this year. In addition to NSLS operations funding, we received $3 million in funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). We used that additional money for two exciting projects: construction of a full-field x-ray microscope and acquisition of several advanced x-ray detectors. The x-ray microscope will be able to image objects with a targeted spatial resolution of 30 nanometers. This capability will be particularly important for new initiatives in energy research and will prepare our users for the projected 1-nanometer resolution benchmark at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II). The detectors project is expected to increase the throughput of several high-demand beamlines by an order of magnitude as well as enable new classes of experiments. In addition, a huge chunk of ARRA money - $150 million - was put toward accelerating the construction of NSLS-II, which is now taking shape across the street. Now physically much more than just a pile of dirt, NSLS-II was granted Critical Decision 3 status by the Department of Energy (DOE) early last year, giving the official go-ahead for construction. In July, construction began, marked by a groundbreaking ceremony that attracted elected officials, media, and DOE, Battelle, and Stony Brook University representatives from across the state and the country. As progress on NSLS-II continues, we're working with Stony Brook University to identify ways to capitalize on the facility's unique capabilities through the Joint Photon Sciences Institute (JPSI). Included in this effort is a series of workshops to encourage the development and application of the photon sciences with collaborative research between industries, universities, and national laboratories. We helped host three of these workshops this year, focusing on microelectronics, energy storage, and materials in next-generation energy systems. The conversation and ideas generated at these meetings has been fresh and valuable and we hope to use this model to organize research opportunities in other scientific fields. Also this year: Brookhaven was deemed the lead institution for one of DOE's 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers, focused on understanding the underlying nature of superconductivity in complex materials by using techniques at the NSLS and CFN; DOE awarded a $100,000 supplemental grant to our detector program to continue the development of a new generation of x-ray detectors that use germanium sensors, which, at high energies, are much more efficient than equivalent ones based on silicon; and funding for one of our largest consortia, Case Western Reserve University's Center for Synchrotron Biosciences (CSB), was renewed through the National Institutes of Health. The CSB, which operates five NSLS beamlines and serves more than 550 users, will receive a five-year, $4-million grant to continue to study the structure and dynamics of proteins and nucleic acids. Finally, construction of the new X9 beamline and endstation for small angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) and wide angle x-ray scattering (WAXS) was completed this year. By July, the beamline and endstation were commissioned and serving general users. This allowed for the relocation of the SAXS and WAXS experimental programs from beamline X21 to X9, providing much-needed beam time for the soft condensed matter physics, life sciences, and nanoscience communities.

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