Earth and Environmental Sciences Workshop

January 22–23, 2008

Scope & Purpose:
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is in the advanced stages of planning the design of a third generation light source, NSLS-II, which will be sited here at BNL. The next immediate step in that process is the identification of what specific beamlines and capabilities are needed and the organization of design teams that will lead those efforts. This will ultimately be done through the submissions of "Letters of Interest" (LOI's) to the NSLS-II facility advisory committee. Given that the environmental sciences and geosciences communities are a significant user group of all the DOE synchrotron user facilities, we are scheduling a two day workshop to be held here at BNL January 22-23, 2008 for Molecular Environmental Science, Geochemistry, and High Pressure/High Energy Earth Science researchers. The goal of this workshop is to help identify what beamlines we as a community feel are critical for our research programs at NSLS-II, define what technical capabilities we’d like these beamlines to possess, and then identify individuals in our community that are willing, able, and experienced enough to organize as working groups that will move forward these designs. We hope to not only make recommendations for completely new end-stations for NSLS-II, but also to make recommendations to the NSLS (that will be incorporated into the NSLS 5 year plan) for end-stations we feel are suitable for upgrade and transition from the current facility to NSLS-II. This is particularly critical in keeping continuity of research programs over the transition period, considering that transitioned bend magnet / three pole wiggler beamlines are likely to come on-line earlier in the project. Our hope is that in time the working groups we identify at this workshop will self-organize as members of a Beamline Advisory Team (BAT) that will then move forward on their own in generating and submitting LOI's for some of these beamlines. The workshop participants will jointly author a white paper that will be submitted to the NSLS-II design team and the Experimental Facilities Advisory Committee (EFAC) for consideration.

The workshop is open to all who wish to participate and builds on two other workshops that were held in July of this year. The first was the Environmental and Earth Science breakout session as part of the NSLS-II user workshop held here at BNL this past July 17th. The second was the EnviroSync organized and DOE sponsored "Workshop for Assessing the Synchrotron Radiation Needs of the Molecular Environmental Science (MES) and Low-temperature Geochemistry (LTG) Community", which was held on July 23-24, 2007, in Rockville, Maryland. These two workshops provided community feedback on what capabilities the community envisions it requires at NSLS-II, which culminated in a white paper presented to DOE entitled "An Initial Assessment of the Needs of the NSLS-II Molecular Environmental Sciences / Low-Temperature Geochemistry User Community". This document contained an initial assessment of beamline requirements and is posted here: http://www.bnl.gov/x26a/download/NSLS2_MESGeo.pdf. The workshop this coming January will use this document as a template in building a much more technically specific white paper to be submitted to NSLS-II planners. If you are broadly interested in the applications of synchrotron methods to Earth and Environmental Science research programs, this is your opportunity to get your agenda heard, written and acted on. This is a unique ground-floor opportunity for the environmental sciences and geosciences communities to influence beamline development that will benefit our research programs.