This month Argonne hosted a successful visit from Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. It’s always nice to be able to show off our scientific capabilities to our Department of Energy sponsors. And for this visit, we were able to tout the unique capabilities of the upgraded Advanced Photon Source (APS), which has been up and running for more than a year now.

We brought the secretary into the new Long Beamline Building and showed him the High-Energy X-ray Microscope (HEXM), one of the two feature beamlines currently being commissioned there. HEXM will be one of the most powerful high-energy X-ray microscopes in the world, able to image materials structure at various length scales from subatomic to macroscopic. We briefed Secretary Wright on the many uses of these capabilities, such as the development of more resilient materials for nuclear energy and aerospace applications.

The secretary even placed an inaugural sample — in this case, part of a turbine blade for a jet engine — into the new HEXM instrument, as you can see in the photos below. It was a terrific day here, and we’re grateful to Secretary Wright and everyone at DOE for their support of our work.

Otherwise, it has been another productive month here at the APS. We’re partway through the second user run of 2025. Our users have been seeing great results on our new and upgraded beamlines. The APS Upgrade project is coming in for a landing, and one of the last beamlines constructed as part of the project, in Sector 34, received its first light this month. Below, you can see the progress of our efforts to bring beamlines back online, and an updated version of this graphic is posted on the APS website every Monday morning.

Speaking of the website, if you enjoyed the People of the APS profiles we linked last month, we have a couple more for you this month: Mechanical Operations and Maintenance Group Leader Ralph Bechtold and Shielding Configuration Specialist Wendy VanWingeren. Check the website for future profiles and updates on all things APS.

Enjoy the summer while it’s here. I’ll talk with you again next month.

Sincerely,
Jonathan Lang
Interim Deputy Associate Laboratory Director 
for Science and Technology, Photon Sciences

Click on the image below for a larger version.