From the Director
Dear Colleague,

Although it is still very warm and humid outside, summer in Ithaca is coming to a close and everyone is getting ready for the return of students to campus and the beginning of the new academic year.

Just this morning I had the pleasure of listening to the final project reports of our SERCCS, SUNRISE, and PREM summer students. I am so proud of all of them. They all did a fantastic job.

This summer CHESS hosted both the CHESS Users’ Meeting and a series of science and hands on workshops. Over the next several months, we’ll be developing the information from these workshops into the CHESS 2030 science document.

During the summer maintenance period, we made significant progress on a huge number of jobs. A few of the highlights include major upgrades to our power distribution infrastructure, upgrades to the linac and synchrotron RF power supplies, and repairs and maintenance to our cooling water systems. We also installed a new wide band-pass multilayer monochromator on the FAST beamline and new white beam slits for QM2. These projects promise to improve the performance and reliability of our systems.

A couple of science highlights:

From the FAST beamline, in a continuing push to understand emerging materials, recent research produced some of the first measurements of individual grain deformation in high entropy alloys.

The ID7B2 beamline, jointly operated by MacCHESS, high-pressure crystallography progress furthers the mission of studying macromolecules under pressure.

CHESS is looking forward to resumption of user operations in September. We will continue to offer remote access on all beamlines and are planning to support full on-site user access. Due to the on-going Covid-19 pandemic, CHESS will follow Cornell University’s guidelines for visitors. As of August 5, 2021 highlights of that policy are:
  • CHESS Users from Cornell University and/or other facilities (not Cornell affiliated) will be allowed to come on site. There will be no restriction on the number of users allowed per beamline.
  • All CHESS users must wear masks indoors, regardless of vaccination status
  • CHESS Users who are on site for more than 7 days will need to enroll in Cornell University’s Daily Check System (we expect this to be very few users, if any) 

As Cornell University visitor guidelines change, CHESS user policy will change to follow those guidelines.

I look forward to welcoming our CHESS users back into the lab! Hope to see you soon,

Joel Brock, Director, CHESS (email Joel)
Summer Students: Live and In-Person
CHESS Summer students came together last month for their first, and only, in-person meeting of the summer. The group of students have been working remotely with their mentors since the start of the program on June 6th due to Covid-safety precautions.

For two short days on the Cornell Campus, the students from around the country - including four students from Puerto Rico - were able to meet their mentors from CHESS and their peers from other community colleges and undergraduate institutions. Their trip to Cornell offered the opportunity to tour the CHESS facility, explore the Ithaca area, and present their summer projects to an audience of CHESS directors, graduate students, and their fellow summer research students. 
Q&A with CHESS Summer Students
As the summer comes to an end so do the summer student research and engineering programs. We interviewed a few of this year's students from across the CHESS summer programs. Click through to meet Camille, Daric, and Jacob!
Upcoming CHESS 2030 Workshops
These workshops are a chance to engage existing and future CHESS users, CHESS staff, and the accelerator community in the planning process for the future of CHESS. Upcoming workshops include "Ambient Crystallography" and "Accelerator Development for Timing Experiments at CHESS".

Join us to help us shape the future at CHESS!
Grain-scale deformation of a high entropy alloy using synchrotron high energy diffraction microscopy
New research that exploited the unique strengths of the FAST beamline produced some of the first measurements of individual grain deformation in high entropy alloys. This data can help form accurate predictions of damage and failure processes in these emerging materials, critical for understanding their performance in real-world applications.
Progress in high-pressure crystallography at ID7B2 furthers the mission of HP-Bio
Recent developments at station ID7B2, jointly operated by MacCHESS and the HP-Bio project of CHEXS, demonstrate the use of high-pressure crystallography to examine the response of macromolecules to changes in pressure.
Issue No. 86 • 2021.8.17
CHESS
607-255-7163
Connect with us