BCSB represented at the ACA in New Orleans

ALS is down for the month of July and the first week or so of August. We are taking the opportunity to do a bunch of preventative maintenance on our beamlines. Some of the items include: – cleaning the Be window on 502 (may help to decrease scatter in images) – replacing air lines –…

From July 2017 to May 2018, the BCSB received (and shipped back after beamtime) 758 dewars. Most of these were handled by Anthony. Wow!

We are very pleased to now have Daniil Prigozhin in the BCSB. He comes to us with a strong background in crystallography, both growing crystals and solving structures. He completed his PhD work with Dr. Tom Alber at UC Berkeley in 2014, then did a post-doc with Dr. Yorgo Modis at the University of Cambridge,…

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!

The next test is to run the 501 and 502 Pilatus detectors simultaneously off the same PPU.

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…