Message from Murray Gibson:

Renewing and upgrading the Advanced Photon Source: a real opportunity for user engagement

May 22, 2008

Now in its twelfth year of operation, the Advanced Photon Source (APS) annually provides almost 3500 users with brilliant x-rays that lead to more than 1000 refereed publications each year covering many areas of science and engineering. Nevertheless, the facility, like any scientific instrument, is showing its age, and we have been working for several years on renewal and upgrade plans. These plans have recently received a boost because our sponsor - the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences - has asked us for a detailed, science-driven plan for the renewal of APS to cover the next five years. This renewal plan will encompass innovations in the beamlines and the x-ray source that are needed for major improvements in important areas of user science. We are engaging our users and staff ab initio in building this APS renewal plan, and we will use our Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) and other outside experts to help us craft a plan with maximum scientific impact. A planning milestone will be a workshop to be held October 20-21, 2008 near the APS, at which the SAC will take a first complete look at the plan and give their advice. At present we continue to solicit proposals from our beamline staff, users, and accelerator and other APS staff. These proposals will be filtered by science-focused user groups, and they will also be analyzed in a matrix fashion by technique coordinators. More information, as well as details about how you can take part in the planning and communicate your perspective, can be found on this Web site.

The renewal of APS is the first component of a strategic plan for the APS that aims to provide our users with the best hard x-ray source in the nation, and beyond, by the year 2020. During the renewal period, we will be evaluating, with our users, the options for a major accelerator facility upgrade (PDF) at APS that could give revolutionary improvements far surpassing the properties of the existing storage ring. (More information on the various upgrade options and other background information is archived at the APS Upgrade web page.) Because of the need for significant R&D to support the most innovative and revolutionary options, we envisage that the final choice for the form of any proposed upgrade may take a few years. During that time we hope to carry out R&D so that we would be in a position to have an upgraded source by the year 2020. We expect that our APS2020 plan will be a keystone of Argonne National Laboratory's strategic plan, "ANL2020," which is currently being developed in partnership with the Department of Energy.

Message from Denny Mills:

As we take on the task of defining the APS Renewal it is our goal to engage all our users and we welcome input from the entire APS community. Please see my talk from the Users Meeting, APS Renewal and Beyond: Plotting Out a Course of Action, for more details of the plan and our proposal to move forward. You may address your comments or questions on the process itself to any of members of the steering committee.

Over the next several weeks we will be organizing scientific-based teams of users and APS staff to develop the scientific case for the renewal. We encourage the members of the APS community to join one of these teams, (you can e-mail me at dmm@aps.anl.gov if you are interested) or, at a minimum, make your concerns known to one of the Steering Committee members. The membership of these teams will be posted on this Web site once they have been finalized.

In addition to organizing science-based teams, we will identify technical contacts, both on the beamline side and on the accelerator systems side and will be posting the contacts' e-mail addresses on this site in the near future. Feel free to contact them as well with your technical questions or comments.

This process is leading up to the renewal planning meeting on October 20 and 21, 2008. Please visit this page to see when and where additional planning meetings will be held. We thank you for your input as we move ahead.