The APS Upgrade Opens New Opportunities for NSF’s ChemMatCARS

The imminent upgrade of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) coupled to major enhancements of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) ChemMatCARS facility open exciting new opportunities for our users who explore research opportunities at the frontiers of the chemistry, materials, engineering, and biological sciences.

Thanks to funding from the NSF, ChemMatCARS will be a two-beamline facility, the better to serve our already oversubscribed user communities and new communities identified during our 2019 workshops.

The new, second insertion device (ID) beamline will be coupled to a second undulator source. In addition, the existing ID beamline will be modernized. All of these initiatives will be accomplished beginning in April 2023 in conjunction with the APS shutdown for installation of the new multi-bend achromat storage ring. The parameters of that new ring will be ideal for ChemMatCARS research programs.

The enhanced brightness (1000-fold at most source energies) afforded by the APS Upgrade (APS-U) will provide a smaller, more coherent beam spot with improved focus on the micrometer to nanometer scale. This will enable a broad range of new scientific activities at ChemMatCARS including serial crystallography of small molecules, studies of biomembrane phenomena and cell-surface interactions, interfacial heterogeneities, drops, and fluid flow.

The 100-fold increase in the coherent fraction of the APS-U beam presents opportunities for high spatial resolution even for non-periodic materials. The high energies of the APS-U beam will penetrate bulk materials to probe buried structures, allow enhanced scattering from buried Interfaces, support the study of highly absorbing crystalline and liquid systems, and enable enhanced diffuse scattering for the study of materials defects, disorder, and dynamics.

(For details and news about the APS-U, click here.)

The new beamline E station will support liquid-solid interface studies for a new biomembrane community that dovetails with chemistry-of-life processes that are currently studied only at the liquid-vapor Interface. Initiatives in heterogeneities, drops, and fluid flow will take advantage of a new, hybrid liquid interface scattering instrument in the E station.

The new beamline B station will support small-molecule serial crystallography to temporally resolve irreversible processes in micro-crystals, and resonant diffraction that extends over all transition elements for element-specific location and redox states.

News about progress on NSF’s ChemMatCARS beamline construction, program enhancements, and equipment upgrades will be shared with our users via the new NSF’s ChemMatCARs newsletter.