It's a New Year at NSLS-II
January 17, 2018
Welcome to the latest edition of News@NSLS-II!
I am writing to you as we start the first operations cycle of 2018, which promises to be an exciting one. In this cycle, we will have users on 19 beamlines. Another four beamlines are in technical commissioning, and another five will complete construction this year. This very rapid build-up of beamlines has required a lot of work by many people over the last few years, but the results are spectacular! The array of capabilities that is now available to the user community is truly inspiring, as are the results we are seeing from the science being carried out here. You can get a taste of some of these results in the stories in this newsletter. Meanwhile, the machine performance continues to improve and we will deliver beam at 350 mA with high reliability in this upcoming cycle.
As we look to continue to improve the user experience, we have moved our check-in services to the Guest, User & Visitor (GUV) Center in Building 400 at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This should be your first stop EVERY time you come to Brookhaven Lab, after the main gate (see map). At the GUV center, you can get your user badge, your access card to the NSLS-II experimental floor, your TLD, and other useful information for your stay at the Lab. The Housing Office, Enterprise Rental Car facility, ATM, Micro Food Mart, and Starbucks are also located in the same building. After your stop at the GUV center, you can go directly to your beamline. Hopefully this “one-stop-shopping” experience will expedite and simplify the user check-in process.
Speaking of users, we had 548 unique users in the first four months of this fiscal year, which is more than half of what we had in all of last year. It is very satisfying to see such strong growth in the user program!
Finally, we have developed a series of lectures to provide a comprehensive introduction to the advanced materials characterization and fabrication techniques available at NSLS-II and at Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN). The slides are now available online,— with video recordings coming soon — I encourage you to take advantage of this wonderful resource to learn about the array of techniques that can address your scientific and technical challenges.
Thank you for taking the time to read our newsletter and I hope to see you at NSLS-II in the near future!
John Hill, NSLS-II Director
