Advancing Your Science

John Hill enlarge

NSLS-II director John Hill stands on the balcony above the experimental floor.

Happy New Year and Welcome Back to News @ NSLS-II!

First, I am pleased to be able to tell you that we have further ramped up our experimental capabilities by transitioning six additional beamlines from science commissioning to general user operations in the past four months. Altogether, we now have 28 beamlines that are taking light, while our accelerator is running with high reliability at 400 mA. NSLS-II now has a powerful suite of capabilities with world-leading resolution and sensitivity that can address your science challenges in a number of ways. Further, because we recognize that the most important science questions require more than one technique to make progress—the so-called multimodal approach—we will soon allow multiple beamlines to be requested in a single proposal.

In this context, I am excited to announce that the NSLS-II Experimental Tools II (NEXT-II) construction project was awarded CD-0 by the U.S. Department of Energy, Mission Need on December 18, 2018. This is the first step in the process of building additional beamline capabilities at NSLS-II. We will also be holding a Scientific Strategic Planning Workshop later this year to further discuss and plan future beamlines at the facility.

Second, I would like to tell you about our new neighbor: the Laboratory for Biomolecular Structure, which will offer state-of-the-art cryo-electron microscopy for atomic resolution structural determination of large proteins and complexes that cannot be crystallized. This new facility will be built adjacent to NSLS-II and we expect that many users will take advantage of both facilities and their complementary set of techniques to study biological systems. We celebrated the groundbreaking for this new facility on December 13, 2018. A screening microscope—the first of two microscopes in the facility—will be installed this month, with the second, high-resolution microscope expected to be operational roughly one year from now.

Another important aspect of NSLS-II that I would like to highlight is our focus on software development for data analysis and data acquisition. User experiments benefit from the fact that most of our beamlines are running the same data acquisition system, called BlueSky. BlueSky is a powerful python-based, open-source software package that significantly eases the process of collecting and analyzing data at NSLS-II. A number of other light sources are also adopting BlueSky and we hope that, ultimately, this will facilitate scientific collaboration between facilities worldwide. BlueSky stands on the shoulders of the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control Software (EPICS) and provides additional capabilities such as experimental orchestration, live visualization, and data processing tools, and can export data into nearly any file format in real time.

In the rest of this newsletter, you will find articles on some of the exciting science that has recently been carried out at NSLS-II and a link to submit your own beam time proposals (next deadline is January 31, 2019). 

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