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.
The Advanced Light Source is planning a major upgrade, which will result in brighter, more coherent beams. The upgrade will occur in 4-5 years, and so now is the time for the biosciences community to define our vision of synchrotron capabilites for biosciences (scattering, diffraction, tomography and IR methods) in the years to come, and…
The next test is to run the 501 and 502 Pilatus detectors simultaneously off the same PPU.
The robot dewars have been taken off of 502 and 503 in order to replace the motors and perform maintenance on the stages.
Recently, Marc helped a user run some crystals which the user had arranged to have grown in zero-gravity. Here are pictures of the crystal capillaries mounted at the beamline, and the raster grid used to locate crystals within a capillary.
During the January shutdown, we decided to test the two Q315R detectors that used to live in beamlines 5.0.1 and 5.0.2. Fortunately, they still work! Once Gemini is commissioned (at the end of this year, if all goes well) then we will have to take the Pilatus out of 5.0.1 and move it over to Gemini. Therefore, good to know that the Q315R is still good. Here it is being tested on the floor at 5.0.1.
