Latest Beamline Stories

ESRF inaugurates unique new X-ray facility Scientists will soon be exploring matter at temperatures and pressures so extreme it can only be produced for microseconds using powerful pulsed lasers. Matter in such states is present in the Earth's liquid iron core, 2500 kilometers beneath the surface, and also in elusive "warm dense matter" inside large planets like Jupiter. A new X-ray beamline ID24 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, allows a new...

Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source uncovers colossal conductivity changes in a special materialIf there were a Hall of Fame for materials, manganites would be among its members. Some manganites, compounds of manganese oxides, are renowned for colossal magnetoresistance "“ the ability to suddenly boost resistance to electrical conductivity by orders of magnitude when a magnetic field is applied "“ and manganites are also promising candidates for spintronics applications "“ devices that...

INDIANAPOLIS, July 14, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory announced today the completion of Lilly's $2 million upgrade to the company's research-guided beamline, located at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne's campus outside of Chicago. The APS is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility operated by Argonne. The Lilly Research Laboratories Collaborative Access Team (LRL-CAT)...

Researchers say a new facility opening later this year at Britain's Diamond Light Source synchrotron may revolutionize science. Officials said the powerful new experimental station called the Joint Engineering, Environmental and Processing beamline will carry out experiments in a variety of scientific areas, including biology and physical and chemical science. The versatility of JEEP will open up exciting new opportunities in many fields of science due to its extremely high flux, high energy...

A new facility opening later this year at the Diamond synchrotron is set to revolutionize world heritage science. A new research platform soon to be available at the leading UK science facility, Diamond Light Source, will help uncover ancient secrets that have been locked away for centuries. For the first time ever, cultural heritage scientists will be able to scan and image large relics and artifacts up to two tons in weight in incredible precision. They will no longer be restricted to...

 An international team of researchers including scientists at the Carnegie Institution has discovered a new chemical compound that consists of a single element"•boron. Chemical compounds are conventionally defined as substances consist of two or more elements, but the researchers found that a high pressure and temperature pure boron can assume two distinct forms that bond together to create a novel 'compound' called boron boride.Because of its low mass, high strength, and response to...

By Anonymous The brilliant beamlines of the Australian Synchrotron are finding a host of environmental applications, from studying the chemistry of the upper atmosphere to developing better catalysts for hydrogen production. Detecting and precisely locating specific atoms and molecules is one of the things synchrotrons do best. That makes them very useful for many environmental applications. The Australian Synchrotron's microspectroscopy beamline, for instance, can be used as a probe to map...

The pinhole camera, a technique known since ancient times, has inspired a futuristic technology for lensless, three-dimensional imaging. Working at both the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and at FLASH, the free-electron laser in Hamburg, Germany, an international group of scientists has produced two of the brightest, sharpest x-ray holograms of microscopic objects ever made, thousands of times more efficiently than...

It might seem at first glance to be one of the simpler techniques performed at the Australian Synchrotron, but X-ray absorption spectroscopy requires a beamline that is very finely tuned. The technique measures the amount of X-rays absorbed by a sample while scanning a selected range of X-ray energies. The result is information on what elements are present and in what chemical form, what their local environment is and how they are bonded. The technique is only available at synchrotrons. The...

Extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) may be the next-generation patterning technique used to produce smaller and faster microchips with feature sizes of 32 nanometers and below. However, durable projection optics must be developed before this laboratory technique can become commercially viable. As part of its long-standing effort to develop EUVL metrology and calibration services (summarized in a recent paper*), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is creating a...