1. GAS-PHASE MOLECULES ILLUMINATED FROM WITHIN
by Lori Tamura
(Contact: doerner@hsbpc1.ikf.physik.uni-frankfurt.de)

Seeing is believing, and the importance of visualization is obvious at the molecular level, which lies outside the realm of everyday experience. But because traditional techniques for probing within molecules (such as photoelectron diffraction) require knowledge of the molecule's orientation, they can't provide very information-rich pictures for molecules in the gas phase. Addressing this problem, an international collaboration of researchers has demonstrated a multiparticle coincidence technique at the ALS that yields comprehensive photoelectron diffraction data for gaseous carbon monoxide as if the molecules were fixed in space. The most striking aspect of viewing molecules "illuminated" from within this way is how the results reveal, nearly at a glance, the major physical features at play.

Read the full story at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/science/sci_archive/46gasXPD.html.

Publication about this research: A. Landers, Th. Weber, I. Ali, A. Cassimi, M. Hattass, O. Jagutzki, A. Nauert, T. Osipov, A. Staudte, M.H. Prior, H. Schmidt-Böcking, C.L. Cocke, and R. Dörner, "Photoelectron Diffraction Mapping: Molecules Illuminated from Within," Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 013002 (2001).

2. LAST CALL: GENERAL SCIENCES PROPOSALS DUE DECEMBER 1
(Contact: alsproposals@lbl.gov)

Saturday, December 1, 2001, is the deadline for independent investigator proposals in the general sciences for the running period from June to November 2002. (This information does not apply to protein crystallography proposals, which have a separate process and schedule.) Scientists wishing to renew a previous proposal must fill in a one-page ALS Experiment Report and Request for Beamtime form and submit it to the User Services Office by the December 1 deadline. The User Services Office has sent email confirmations for all proposals received so far. If you submitted a proposal but have not received confirmation, please contact Bernie Dixon at alsproposals@lbl.gov. The numeric rating for each proposal will be communicated to the investigator along with comments from the Proposal Study Panel, where appropriate. The cutoff rating for each beamline in the previous proposal cycle is published on the Web (see below). The following resources are available for further information:

ALS User Services Administrator

alsuser@lbl.gov

Independent investigator process

http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/quickguide/independinvest.html

Beamline information

http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/als_users_bl/datasheets.html

http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/als_users_bl/bl_table.html

Proposal Study Panel (PSP) scores

http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/quickguide/pspscores.html

3. APS SYMPOSIUM ON EXCITED-STATE SPECTROSCOPIES

A special symposium on theory and experiment for excited-state spectroscopies will be held at the upcoming March Meeting of the American Physical Society, to be held in Indianapolis, March 18 - 22, 2002. All of the primary soft x-ray techniques used at the ALS will be valid topics for presentation and discussion at this symposium. The deadline for submitting abstracts is December 7, 2002 (for submission details, see http://www.aps.org/meet/MAR02/abs.html). The symposium, "Excited State Electronic Structure and Response Functions" (17.9.1), will explore new methods and algorithms for the quantitative description of excitations and response functions. Contributions from both theory and experiment are encouraged. Invited speakers include Lars Jonsson (Ohio State Univ.), "Accurate electron and hole states in heterostructures;" W. Gero Schmidt (Friedrich-Schiller-Univ., Jena), "Surface optical properties: defects, self-energy;" George Sawatzky (Univ. of British Columbia), "Spectroscopy in correlated systems;" and Eric Shirley (National Institute of Standards and Technology), "Theory of x-ray absorption and scattering." More information on the symposium can be found at http://www.aps.org/meet/MAR02/focus.html#1791.

4. UEC CORNER: NOTES FROM THE USERS' EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
by Harald Ade
(Contact: harald_ade@ncsu.edu)

The UEC election results are now in. Sophie Canton, John Bozek, Yasuji Muramatsu, Eli Rotenberg, and Alexander Moewes will be joining the UEC. Their terms start on January 1, 2002. I am sure they will do a wonderful job representing those who voted for them as well as all ALS users.

5. 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
David Sigee (Univ. of Manchester, UK)
Liane Benning (Univ. of Leeds, UK)

Beamline 4.0.1-2
George Waddill (Univ. of Missouri-Rolla)

Beamlines 5.0.1, 5.0.2, and 5.0.3
Weiru Wang, Shengfeng Chen, Dong Hae Shin (Berkeley Structural Genomics Center)
Mark Knapp, Armando Villasenor (Roche Bioscience)
Zhulun Wang, Jinsong Liu (Tularik, Inc.)
Jiandong Zhang, Tim Osslund (Amgen, Inc.)
Justin Piper, Chu-Young Kim, Marcus Hans, Tom Lee, Hu Pan, Julian Chen, Sheryl Tsai (Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Lidia Mosyak, Joel Bard (Genetics Institute, Inc.)
Alice Vrielink, Paula Lario, Babu Manjasetty (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz)
Michael Marino (Univ. of California, San Diego)
Andreas Kreusch, Glen Spraggon (Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation)
Doug Juers, Gerry Ostheimer (Howard Hughes Medical Institute)

Beamline 7.0.1
Z.Q. Qiu (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Jim Tobin (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Harald Ade (North Carolina State Univ.)
Joerg Schaefer (Univ. Augsburg, Germany)
Timothy Schuler (Tulane Univ.)

Beamline 7.3.3
Greg Hura (Berkeley Lab)

Beamline 8.0.1
David Shuh (Berkeley Lab)

Beamline 8.3.1
Ernst Bergmann, Jason Maynes, David Arthur, Paul Scott (Univ. of Alberta, Canada)
Kevin Slep, Tom Lee, Hu Pan (Univ. of California, San Francisco)

Beamline 10.3.2
Donald Sparks (Univ. of Delaware)

6. OPERATIONS UPDATE
(Contact: Lampo@lbl.gov)

For the user run of November 14 - 20, the beam reliability (time delivered/time scheduled) was 98.7%. Of the scheduled beam, 90.7% 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/accelinfo.html). Requests for special operations use of the "scrubbing" shift should be sent to Bruce Samuelson (BCSamuelson@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.

LBNL/PUB-848
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.