ALSNews Vol. 236, December 10, 2003
ALSNews is a biweekly electronic newsletter to keep users and other interested parties informed about developments at the Advanced Light Source, a national user facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California. To be placed on the mailing list, send your name and complete internet address to ALSNews@lbl.gov. We welcome suggestions for topics and content.
Previous Issues are available.
Table of Contents
- Why Alcohol and Water Don't Mix
- SAC Meeting Scheduled for December 16 - 17
- Berkeley Lab Celebrates ALS and NCEM Anniversaries
- UEC Corner: Notes from the Users' Executive Committee
- Latest Activity Report Now Posted Online
- Who's in Town: A Sampling of ALS Users
- Holiday Closure Schedule
- Operations Update
1. WHY ALCOHOL AND WATER DON'T MIX
by Jinghua Guo, Lynn Yarris, and Lori Tamura
(Contacts: JGuo@lbl.gov, luo@theochem.kth.se)
Devotees of scotch and water should be advised they may never attain the perfect blend. A group of scientists has used x-ray absorption and selectively excited x-ray emission spectroscopy at the ALS to study the electronic states of liquid water mixed with the simplest type of alcohol, methanol. While methanol is not used in beverages (it's actually a poison), its molecular behavior when mixed with water is expected to be the same as that of ethanol, the drinkable form of alcohol. Beyond advances in mixology, however, the ability to determine the mixing properties of different liquids is of great importance: many vital chemical and biological processes take place in aqueous solutions. The emission spectra obtained in this study reveal that the water and alcohol molecules in solution form complex hydrogen-bonded networks and mix very little at the microscopic level. The results illustrate the technique's potential to provide new and valuable information about the microscopic origins of the properties of liquids and solutions.
Read the full story at
http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/science/sci_archive/70methanolmix.html.
Publication about this research: J.-H. Guo, Y. Luo, A. Augustsson, S. Kashtanov, J.-E. Rubensson, D.K. Shuh, H. Agren, and J. Nordgren, "The Molecular Structure of Alcohol-Water Mixtures," Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 157401 (2003).
2. SAC MEETING SCHEDULED FOR DECEMBER 16 - 17
(Contact: NVSmith@lbl.gov)
The ALS Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) will convene at the ALS on Tuesday, December 16, and Wednesday, December 17. The SAC is charged with advising Berkeley Lab and ALS management on issues relating to ALS operations, resource allocation, and strategic planning. The agenda for the first day includes discussions of the ALS upgrade, the latest superbend beamlines, and plans for Beamline 9.0. The second day's agenda includes a discussion of nanoscience at the ALS and other administrative matters. The presentations will be open to all (except for executive sessions at the end of both days), and users are especially invited to attend the ALS upgrade session on Tuesday from 9:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Room 6-2202. Current members of the advisory committee are listed online (go to http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/ourorg/sac.html).
3. BERKELEY LAB CELEBRATES ALS AND NCEM ANNIVERSARIES
Berkeley Lab yesterday celebrated the milestones achieved this year by two of its most distinguished national user facilities. To honor the 20th anniversary of the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) and the 10th anniversary of the ALS, the Lab held a special program of talks that reflected upon the history and the future of both facilities. Two individuals who played major roles in the development of the centers--NCEM founding scientist Gareth Thomas and ALS Project Director Jay Marx--waxed nostalgic while current NCEM Director Uli Dahmen and ALS Deputy for Science Neville Smith discussed current strategies and plans. The celebration also included employee tours of the two facilities and a commemorative section published in the employee newspaper (see http://www.lbl.gov/Publications/Currents/Archive/Dec-05-2003.html).
4. UEC CORNER: NOTES FROM THE USERS' EXECUTIVE
COMMITTEE
by Jennifer Doudna
(Contact: doudna@uclink.berkeley.edu)
As this year draws to a close, the UEC looks ahead to exciting developments in 2004. The ALS upgrades are moving forward as planned, and to facilitate input from a broad spectrum of the community, a group comprising beamline scientists and users, including UEC members John Bozek and Eli Rotenberg, has agreed to work directly with ALS management. To help ensure a smooth transition, as well as provide a forum for user discussions, a UEC website is being created, and it should come online soon. And the UEC continues to plan future lobbying efforts in Washington and with our congressional representatives to raise public awareness of, and support for, synchrotron research.
I am delighted to have had the opportunity to work with so many talented and dedicated people at the ALS over the past year. The leadership of the UEC will be rotating into the able hands of Dennis Lindle, incoming chair, and Greg Denbeaux, the incoming Vice Chair, and I will continue to work with the UEC in an ex-officio role as we prepare for the year ahead. Happy holidays!
5. LATEST ACTIVITY REPORT NOW POSTED ONLINE
(Contact: AMGreiner@lbl.gov)
A PDF version of the 2002 ALS Activity Report has been posted online (go to http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/actrep). The Activity Report is published annually and illustrates the depth and breadth of the ALS scientific program with a selection of research results. The 2002 edition contains feature articles on the spectroscopy of water and the growth of the protein crystallography program at the ALS. The report also summarizes operations, ongoing R&D, educational outreach efforts, and special events. Printed copies will be mailed to all users in the ALS database within the next couple of weeks. Others can request a copy by sending email to alsuser@lbl.gov. Be sure to include your name, complete mailing address, and the name of the publication being requested.
6. WHO'S IN TOWN: A SAMPLING OF ALS USERS
Following are some of the experimenters who will be collecting data during the next two weeks at the ALS.
Beamline 1.4.3
Hoi-Ying Holman (Berkeley Lab)
Jonathan Castro (Oberlin College)
Mandana Veiseh (Univ. of Washington)
Beamline 4.0.2
Stephen Cramer (Univ. of California, Davis, and Berkeley Lab)
Boris Sinkovic (Univ. of Connecticut)
Yves Idzerda (Montana State Univ.)
Chuck Fadley (Univ. of California, Davis, and Berkeley Lab)
Beamlines 5.0.1, 5.0.2, 5.0.3, 8.2.1
Ashley Deacon, Irimpan Mathews, Mitchell Miller, Hsiu-Ju Chiu, Inna Levin,
Qingping Xu (Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory)
Ed Berry, Li-Shar Huang (Berkeley Lab)
Marc Jacobs (Vertex Pharmaceuticals)
Rashid Syed, Jiandong Zhang (Amgen)
Vaheh Oganesyan (Berkeley Lab)
Marty Boulanger, Jennifer Maynard, Huijing Shi (Stanford Univ.)
Beamline 5.3.2
Adam Hitchcock (McMaster Univ., Canada)
Harald Stover (McMaster Univ., Canada)
Harald Ade (North Carolina State Univ.)
Daniel Guay (Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Canada)
Gary Mitchell (The Dow Chemical Company)
Beamline 6.1.2
Greg Denbeaux (Univ. at Albany, State Univ. of New York)
Jeffrey Kortright (Berkeley Lab)
Carolyn Larabell (Berkeley Lab)
Beamline 7.3.1.1
Z.Q. Qiu (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Beamline 7.3.3
Ersan Ustundag (California Institute of Technology)
Beamline 9.0.2
Terrill Cool (Cornell Univ.)
Beamline 9.3.2
Philip Ross (Berkeley Lab)
Piero Pianetta (Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory)
Bongjin Mun (Berkeley Lab)
Beamline 10.0.1
David Pegg (Univ. of Tennessee)
Duane Jaecks (Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Z.-X. Shen (Stanford Univ.)
Gey-Hong Gweon (Berkeley Lab)
Alessandra Lanzara (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Xinjiang Zhou (Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory)
Beamline 10.3.2
John Bargar (Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory)
Yuji Arai (U.S. Geological Survey)
Phoebe Lam (Berkeley Lab)
Berkeley Lab will close on the evening of December 23 and reopen on the morning of January 2. During the closure, the Lab will shut down as much heating and ventilating equipment as possible to reduce costs. The first user run of 2003 will be January 7 - 11. The next issue of ALSNews will be published on January 28. Have a happy holiday season, and we'll see you next year!
8. OPERATIONS UPDATE
(Contact: Lampo@lbl.gov)
For the user run of December 3 - 7, the beam reliability (time delivered/time scheduled) was 99%. Of the scheduled beam, 92% was delivered to completion without interruption. There were no significant outages.
Long-term and weekly operations schedules are available on the Web (http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/schedules/index.html). Requests for special operations use of the "scrubbing" shift should be sent to Jan Pusina (ALS-CR@lbl.gov, x4738) by 1:00 p.m. Friday. The Accelerator Status Hotline at (510) 486-6766 (ext. 6766 from Lab phones) features a recorded message giving up-to-date information on the operational status of the accelerator. A Web page showing the ring status in real time can be found at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/status/.
ALSNews is a biweekly electronic newsletter to keep users informed about developments at the Advanced Light Source, a national user facility located at Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California. To be placed on the mailing list, send your email address to ALSNews@lbl.gov. We welcome suggestions for topics and content. Submissions are due the Friday before the issue date.
LBNL/PUB-875
Editors: lstamura@lbl.gov, alrobinson@lbl.gov, amgreiner@lbl.gov
This work was supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098.