October 28, 2009

Light Sources Staff Makes Strong Showing at Instrumentation Conference

More than 20 Light Sources (LS) Directorate employees attended the 10th international conference on Synchrotron Radiation Instrumentation (SRI) from September 27-October 2, to learn about and present the latest developments in the field. The conference, hosted by the Australian Synchrotron and held in Melbourne, attracted about 680 participants from 28 countries.

The program included almost 150 oral presentations, including seven world-renowned plenary speakers, 26 invited speakers, and 115 symposia speakers selected from abstracts. Two poster sessions showcased 450 posters, and 500 of the participants toured the Australian Synchrotron.

A handful of LS staff served as chairs for parts of the program, including: NSLS-II physicist Andy Broadbent, who helped chair a segment on beamlines and optics; NSLS-II physicist Yong Cai, who co-chaired a session on inelastic scattering and magnetism; NSLS-II physicist Qun Shen, who helped lead two sessions on microscopy and micro/nanoprobes; and NSLS physicist Pete Siddons, who helped lead a session on detectors.

Among the invited speakers were Cai, who spoke about the development of ultrahigh-resolution optics for inelastic x-ray scattering at NSLS-II, and Siddons, who discussed the R&D work taking place to implement advanced detectors at the NSLS.

Symposia speakers from the LS Directorate included:

• Larry Carr, "Laser-Synchrotron Time-Resolved Infrared Spectroscopy in High Magnetic Fields at the NSLS"
• Yong Chu, "Path to 1 nm X-ray Microscopy: Development of Hard X-ray Nanoprobe Beamline at NSLS-II and the Progress of the Supporting R&D Programs"
• Oleg Chubar, "Parametric Optimization of Undulators for NSLS-II Project Beamlines" and "Performance Optimization for Hard X-ray Microscopy Beamlines Guided by Partially Coherent Wavefront Propagation Calculations"
• Ray Conley, "Challenges in Multilayer Laue Lens Development: Nanometer Focusing in 2-D"
• Ken Evans-Lutterodt, "Diamond Kinoform Refractive Lenses: Status of Fabrication and Testing and Future Perspectives"
• Jeff Keister, "Responsivity of Diamond X-ray Photodiodes Calibrated at NSLS"
• Cecilia Sanchez-Hanke, "Magnetic Interfaces Studied with Elliptically Polarized Soft X-Rays"
• Toshi Tanabe, "Cryo-Temperature Field Measurement of PrFeB Undulator and Performance Enhancement Options at NSLS-II.

For more information about the conference, go to http://www.sri09.org/.

Larry Carr gives a presentation at this year’s SRI conference, hosted in Melbourne by the Australian Synchrotron.	Jeff Keister (left) and Scott Coburn at the SRI conference
Pete Siddons at SRI 2009	Oleg Chubar talks at SRI 2009

Photos courtesy of Nancy Mills, Australian Synchrotron