ALSNews Vol. 208, OCtober 2, 2002

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.

ALS Users' Meeting 2002 Update
RIXS Technique Measures Hubbard Interaction
Shining Infrared Light on a Crime Scene
UEC Election: Current Email Address Required
New ALS Web Look Unveiled
Who's in Town: A Sampling of ALS Users
Operations Update

1. ALS USERS' MEETING 2002 UPDATE
(Contact: alsum2002@lbl.gov)

Registration Still Open

If you have not yet signed up for the 2002 ALS Users' Meeting, to be held at Berkely Lab next week, you can still register online by going to http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/usermtg/registration.html. Attendees are strongly encouraged to register as early as possible to avoid security delays upon entrance to the Lab, help organizers arrange for workshop space, and ensure adequate supplies of meeting materials and meals.

Speaker Schedule Finalized

The speakers for the Users' Meeting have been selected. On Thursday, six young researchers will present the results of their work at the ALS. Friday will feature keynote speaker Steve Leone followed by the presentation of five scientific highlights from the past year. An updated schedule has been posted at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/usermtg/program.html. All submitted abstracts that were not selected for oral presentation will be included in the poster session on Thursday afternoon.

Workshop Info Available

The workshops page at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/usermtg/workshops.html has been updated to include workshop descriptions, speaker lists, and schedules where available.

2. RIXS TECHNIQUE MEASURES HUBBARD INTERACTION
by Art Robinson
(Contact: tcallcott@utk.edu)

The Hubbard interaction term U is a measure of the strength of the repulsion between electrons in certain solids, but direct measurements of its value have been difficult. Now, scientists from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory have used the technique of resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) at the Advanced Light Source to make a particularly clean measurement of the Hubbard U in sodium vanadate (NaV₂O₃). The were also able to calculate a value for U in this material, so their measurement makes possible a direct comparison between theory and experiment. In this case, theory and experiment turn out to be in good agreement, thereby suggesting that RIXS provides useful information for solids with strong electron-electron interactions.

Read the full story at http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/science/sci_archive/57rixs.html.

Publication about this research: G.P. Zhang, T.A. Callcott, G.T. Woods, L. Lin, B. Sales, D. Mandrus, J. He, "Electron Correlation Effects in Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering of NaV₂O₃," Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 077401 (2002).

3. SHINING INFRARED LIGHT ON A CRIME SCENE
by Lynn Yarris
(Contact: DLPerry@lbl.gov)

With infrared light, forensic investigators can tell you whether a document is a forgery or paper currency is counterfeit. They can take a paint chip and tell you the make, model and age of a car. Now the boundaries of infrared forensics are being pushed into uncharted territories by researchers at Berkeley Lab, and the results are promising for criminal and antiterrorism investigations as well as for historians and archaeologists.

The Advanced Light Source (ALS), while best known for its x-ray and ultraviolet light, can generate intense beams of photons in the infrared (IR) spectrum. Working at the ALS, Berkeley Lab researchers have applied IR spectromicroscopy in a proof-of-principle study to characterize a variety of inks on paper with unprecedented sensitivity. They have also used these IR beams to obtain chemical "sweatprints" that may be every bit as unique and ubiquitous as a physical fingerprint.

To read the full article, published in the Berkeley Lab newspaper, "Currents," go to http://www.lbl.gov/Publications/Currents/archive/#Shining.

4. UEC ELECTION: CURRENT EMAIL ADDRESS REQUIRED
(Contact:alsuser@lbl.gov)

To vote in the upcoming Users' Executive Committee (UEC) election, you must have a current email address on file with the User Services Office. The email addresses in our user database will be used to validate votes in the upcoming UEC election, to be conducted online from October 17 to November 15, 2002. If your email address has changed in the last year and you have not yet notified us, send your new address via email to alsuser@lbl.gov by October 16, 2002. For more information on the voting process, go to http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/uec/vote/.

5. NEW ALS WEB LOOK UNVEILED
(Contact: AMGreiner@lbl.gov)

Check out the updated ALS Web site at http://www-als.lbl.gov/. It has a fresh new look with added features such as drop-down menus on the home page that take you directly to where you want to go. The redesign incorporates a wider, more open format that allows for a full complement of primary links across the top of each page as well as a column of secondary links down the left. While most of the site's structure has not changed, a few pages have moved. Bookmarks for the following pages may need to be updated:

Operating schedule: http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/schedules/index.html
Weekly schedule: http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/schedules/weekly.html
Technical specifications: http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/techspecs/index.html
Storage ring parameters: http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/techspecs/srparameters.html
Photon source parameters: http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/techspecs/insertdev.html
Individual beamline tables: http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/techspecs/bl#.#.#.html
Links to user sites: http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/usersites.html

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
Simon Clark (Berkeley Lab)

Beamline 4.0.2
Stephen Cramer (Univ. of California, Davis)
Dan Waddill (Univ. of Missouri-Rolla)
Boris Sinkovic (Univ. of Connecticut)

Beamlines 5.0.1, 5.0.2, 5.0.3
Steve Bellon (Vertex Pharmaceuticals)
Julie Lougheed, Paul Foster, Tom Stout, Jeff Till (Exelixis, Inc.; Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Zhangbao Xu, Weixin Xu (Wyeth-Ayerst Research)
Mark Knapp, Armando Villasenor, Gisele Tavares (Roche Bioscience)
Nam-Chul Ha, Bill Weiss (Stanford Univ.)
Ed Berry, Li-Shar Huang (Berkeley Lab)
Gyorgy Snell (Syrrx, Inc.)

Beamline 7.0.1
James Allen (Univ. of Michigan)
Joerg Schaefer (Univ. Augsburg, Germany)
Joseph Nordgren (Uppsala Univ., Sweden)

Beamline 7.3.1.1
Z.Q. Qiu (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Shirley Chiang (Univ. of California, Davis)

Beamline 7.3.3
Teresa Head-Gordon (Berkeley Lab)

Beamline 8.0.1
Anders Nilsson (Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory)

Beamline 8.2.2
Marjeta Podobnik, Steve Kazmirski (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Seth Harris, Kevin Slep (Univ. of California, San Francisco)

Beamline 8.3.1
Kaoru Yoshida, Wa-On Yu (Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Sibyl Baladi, Ho-Leung Ng, Jim Endrizzi (Univ. of California, Berkeley)

Beamline 9.3.2
Glenn Waychunas (Berkeley Lab)

Beamline 10.0.1
Nora Berah (Western Michigan Univ.)
Dan Dessau (Univ. of Colorado at Boulder)
Z.X. Shen (Stanford Univ.)

Beamline 10.3.2
Alain Manceau (Berkeley Lab)
Andy Smith (Daresbury Laboratory, UK)

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

For the user runs of September 17 - 22 and 24 - 30, the beam reliability (time delivered/time scheduled) was 97%. Of the scheduled beam, 73% 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 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.

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-863
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.

ALSNews Vol. 208, OCtober 2, 2002

Previous Issues are available.

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