It turns out there is a small cyclotron at LBNL! It is used to produce medical isotopes used for PET scans. Some of the BCSB staff were lucky enough to be invited on a tour of the cyclotron, which is in building 56, not too far away from our more familiar synchrotron in building 6.
Our second User Forum was on March 4, in which we discussed the purchase of a pixel-array detector for beamline 5.0.2. The exciting news since then is that we will be able to purchase a Pilatus 6M for the beamline. Expected delivery is in September of this year.
The third User Forum was on April 2, in which we discussed the diode-beamstop device which the BCSB is developing (allows measurement of flux during data collection), as well as the MiniKappa interlocks on beamline 5.0.2, which will now allow a full 360 rotation of omega (sometimes called Phi) with a maximum kappa angle of 55 degrees.
Anthony installed the first pin base warmer on 5.0.2 today. We have to wait until the ALS has LN restored before we can test it. One thing to note: the people we spoke to at NE-CAT about their pin base warmer told us that it does not actually solve the icing issue completely. They still do see pins move on the goniometer after mounting. Hopefully the warmer will help a bit, though!
Congrats, beamline 8.2.1!
Marc collected a lysozyme dataset with the new Pilatus 6M detector. All modules are good.
We held a jelly bean counting contest at our booth at the ACA. Matt Clifton of Nurix was the winner. Good job, Matt!
A special welcome to our SULI student, Sayan Roychowhury, who is majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Illinois. He is here with us for the fall term, and writing code to process visual images of protein crystals and center them automatically in the x-ray beam. SULI is the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship program in which the host lab (in this case, LBNL) pays for a student to work for a few months to gain experience at a national lab and to encourage students to remain in STEM fields.
