The APS Upgrade Project has just completed a flurry of technical reviews and advisory committee meetings, culminating with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) annual review of the project. This is in addition to our continued daily progress in preparing equipment for the shutdown, and I’ll start this note by once again thanking everyone on our team for their efforts. We’re in the process of rebuilding an amazing facility, and we have an amazing team that makes this happen.
I’ll start with a couple of links to ongoing work. You may have heard of “building 981,” which is where much of the preassembly work for accelerator and front ends is occurring. You can see a brief fly by video of the inside of the building here just to get a sense of things – it’s pretty amazing.
The new storage ring will be made up of 1,321 electromagnets assembled into 200 modules. For more than a year, the upgrade team has been working on those modules. We now have 185 of the required 200 partially assembled. Even more exciting, the final major components for those modules – a complex vacuum system that is needed to keep the electron beam from dissipating into the atmosphere – have started to arrive and be installed. You can read more about that in this story.
Work also continues on several beamlines. In the Long Beamline Building, the massive High-Energy X-ray Microscope (HEXM) experimental enclosure is nearly complete. In parallel, deconstruction of the enclosure at 8-ID is progressing well, making space for a new one that will house the X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS) beamline. Photos of both of these can be seen above.
As I mentioned above, this past week we successfully completed our yearly DOE review. These critical reviews ensure that we are realistically evaluating our progress to date and our plans going forward. Expert colleagues from across the DOE complex joined us here at Argonne November 15 to 17. I am reminded with each review how discerning and helpful our reviewers are in finding gaps and helping us improve our plans based on their experience. While these reviews are a lot of work for the project team and for the reviewers, it really was a pleasure to host the committee here at Argonne, and – among other things – transmit the building excitement of the project to them.
As always, our thanks go out to you, the people who make use of the APS to change the world for the better. It won’t be long before you’ll have a new world-class x-ray facility for your research, and we can’t wait to see what you will do with it.
Don’t forget to bookmark the APS Upgrade web page for the latest information. You’ll also find a handy matrix of comparable beamlines at other DOE light sources, to help you plan for the year in which the APS is inaccessible.
Thank you again, until next time,
Jim Kerby
Director
APS Upgrade Project