Chi-Chang's Corner

Omnibus, Stimulus Funding Fares Well for Brookhaven Lab, NSLS-II

April 2, 2009

Chi-Chang Kao
NSLS Department Chair
kao@bnl.gov

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After struggling with a rough budget for several years, we've received some very good news related to the recently passed omnibus spending bill and President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The omnibus legislation allocated close to full funding for all of the major user facilities in the Department of Energy (DOE) complex, including the NSLS. As a result, we will receive about $40 million for fiscal year 2009. In addition, Obama's stimulus act doles out $1.2 billion for DOE's Office of Science, of which Brookhaven will receive $150 million to accelerate the construction of NSLS-II.

The current budget also includes significant increases for other science organizations, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. We will continue to work closely with these funders and our users to develop proposals for new synchrotron instrumentation that will be designed and commissioned at the NSLS and then moved to NSLS-II.

Some of this great budget news was delivered to employees firsthand during Laboratory visits by a handful of local and federal officials, including Senator Charles Schumer, Congressman Tim Bishop, New York State Governor David A. Paterson, and DOE Secretary Steven Chu. You can read more about their visits in this issue of eNews.

We've been working hard to clean up and improve management of the laboratories on the experimental floor. We have better defined the lab steward role, completed hazard assessments for the routine work in the labs, and are working to change the Safety Approval Forms to help capture sample preparation and define the controls required for those tasks in the labs and at the beamlines. We're also working to group the labs into specific scientific classifications so that specialized equipment can be ordered and managed. This work should be completed in the coming months.

We had a very productive Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) meeting in late January. The SAC has made a number of recommendations for NSLS management, including: develop a detailed strategic plan for Brookhaven's Light Sources Directorate that defines the future course for synchrotron-based science; implement valid experimental safety reviews for all NSLS laboratories; create a comprehensive industrial user program plan that includes resource requirements and a proposal review process that includes appropriate metrics for industrial research; and prioritize maintenance schedules and maintain adequate machine operation staffing levels. We're working to engage the user community and update plans in the next few months.

Commissioning has begun on beamline X9 - a new undulator-based beamline jointly developed by the NSLS and the Center for Functional Nanomaterials. X9 will host the small-angle x-ray scattering program that currently exists at beamline X21 and will provide much-needed beam time for the soft condensed matter physics, life sciences, and nanoscience communities. The new beamline should be open for general users in the next cycle.

We also found out recently that the NSLS Source Development Laboratory has received funding again in fiscal year 2009 from the Joint Technology Office and the Office of Naval Research. This funding will be used to continue the important work completed through the high-gain laser-seeded free electron laser program.

Finally, researchers from Utrecht University, in The Netherlands, have demonstrated a new way to get a real-time, microscopic view of the inner workings of catalytic reactions. At NSLS beamline U10B, the researchers used an infrared spectrometer coupled with an optical microscope to create a powerful technique that offers unprecedented chemical sensitivity and spatial resolution and provides direct insight into the chemical nature of the reactant molecules, the intermediates, and the resulting products as the catalytic reaction occurs. You can read more in this edition of eNews.