Three overlapping activities are keeping everyone at CHESS fully engaged. The laboratory's main priority is recovering steady x-ray user operations after a long summer of heavy crane activity. Last month you read about the CLEO particle detector being removed. Equally amazing is that over a span of just a few weeks, a significant part of the storage ring was hoisted back into place, carefully positioned, baked out, reconnected, tested, and then "turned on" with the push of a button (almost literally)! X-ray alignment will take place over the next week or so and then users come back in full force.
We also have the CHESS-U project going strong, and this month accelerator scientist Jim Shanks explains some of our design options and ideas for deploying "double-bend achromat" magnet technology to improve our x-ray beam quality. And finally, in addition to reading about a bunch of great user science, this eNews release overlaps with CHESS hosting an NSF annual review panel who are, this year, also considering the scientific opportunities made possible by the CHESS-U project. You'll hear more about that exciting science case in the coming months.
-Ernest Fontes
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