November 21, 2007

NSLS Celebrates its Silver Anniversary

Thursday, November 22, 2007 – Thanksgiving Day – is the 25th anniversary of the NSLS building dedication. The first facility designed and built specifically for producing and exploiting synchrotron radiation, the NSLS was conceived in 1970, officially proposed in 1976, and had its groundbreaking in 1978. It was a rough start, but at the end of the four-year construction period, the project was on schedule and within its set cost of $24 million. And most importantly, both the VUV and X-ray rings had beam.

September 28, 1978 – As part of the NSLS groundbreaking ceremony, NSLS Project Director Arie van Steenbergen and Don Stevens, Director of the Division of Materials Science of the U.S. Department of Energy, dig up a preplanted wooden hv symbol – the expression for the energy of a photon, h being Planck's constant, and v the frequency.

1970 – Renata "Rena" Wiener Chasman (right) and G. Kenneth Green (left) work with NSLS Chair Marty Blume. Chasman and Green were responsible for the ingenious design of the two storage rings at the NSLS, what is commonly known as the "Chasman-Green lattice."

The dedication event took place on November 22, 1982, with Lab Director Nicholas Samios as the master of ceremonies. Speakers included NSLS Chair John McTague, local Congressman William Carney, Don Stevens, Director of the Division of Materials Science of the U.S. Department of Energy, and George A. Keyworth, President Reagan's science advisor. During the celebration, Samios also announced that the NSLS Division was being upgraded to a Department. McTague predicted that within a year, 50 experiments in a wide variety of fields would be running at the NSLS.

May 21-22, 1979 – During the first NSLS Users Workshop, about 75 prospective users the met at the Lab to hear reports on various aspects of the NSLS, at that time still under construction, and to form a users organization. Richard Deslattes of the National Bureau of Standards was elected chairman of the executive committee, and Benno Schoenborn of BNL, secretary. At the close of the first day's session, the participants toured some NSLS laboratories. In this photo, they are visiting the lower level of Bldg. 535, which housed the vacuum assembly area, diagnostics lab, and experimental beamline groups.

1981 – NSLS staff celebrating the first turn of beam around the VUV ring.

Funding difficulties and technical problems caused delays, so it wasn't until April 1984, after a machine shutdown and overhaul, that the design energy of 700 MeV was met in the VUV ring. The X-ray ring followed the next year, meeting its design energy of 2.5 GeV in August 1985. Today, 25 years after its dedication, the NSLS holds its status as one of the world's most productive scientific user facilities. Home to nine R&D 100 Awards and a Nobel Prize, the NSLS hosts more than 2,100 users every year, who, combined with NSLS scientists, produce more than 900 yearly publications on 65 beamlines in diverse fields ranging from biology and physics to environmental and materials sciences.

Now that's something to be thankful for.