Advanced Light Source

@als.lbl.gov

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Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) produces brilliant beams of soft x rays for scientific research. https://als.lbl.gov/

Experiment schematic showing the superlattice structure, with incident (circularly polarized) x-rays coming in at angle θ.
Journal-cover illustration of a four-lane highway, with the two left lanes marked with diamonds (indicating high-occupancy vehicle or “carpool” lanes). The right two lanes are “congested” with gel-like blobs. Red dots (representing ions) are stuck between blobs in the two right lanes, but move unimpeded in the two left lanes.
Ribbon diagram of a protein complex. The main protein structure is white, and the carrier protein (which passes amino acids to and from functional domains) is green. The carrier protein is shown at the beginning and end points of a 180° swing.
Vertical flow chart showing steps in lithium extraction from spodumene: grinding, mixing, heating, washing, evaporation. In the background, diffraction data is presented as a heatmap-style graph, with green vertical lines on a blue background. The green lines represent the spectral fingerprints of the primary reaction products.
Left: Photo of a lilac shrub with reddish buds. Right: 3D microtomographic visualization of a Ceanothus megacarpus leaf (green cube with section cut away). White arrows indicate stomata, which are found exclusively within crypts, or indentations, in the leaf. A 200 µm scale bar is included.
Drawing of an irregular three-dimensional surface draped over a sphere. It has a rainbow color scale, with blue at the edges and red at its peak (where it touches the top of the sphere).
A circlularly cropped headshot of a man in a blue collared shirt, overlaid on a view of the ALS dome and San Francisco Bay.
Comparison of RIXS data for a commonly used commercial cathode material, with and without aluminum doping. A feature associated with oxygen redox reactions is only present with aluminum doping. Accompanying molecular schematics show how aluminum doping might produce the observed behavior via a more stable structure.
Journal-cover illustration showing a conical beam of green light from above passing through a planar crystalline sample, with the beam’s focal point at the surface of the sample. Lightning-like bolts arc from above to the sample. To the right, a block of ordered blue atoms is topped by a sprinkling of gold particles, with a transparent layer on top. The transparent layer is in the process of detaching from the blue/gold substrate. A completely detached transparent layer floats above.
An artistic 3D illustration of neuromorphic computing, showing a close-up of a synapse (junction) between two “artificial neurons.” The neuron on the lower left contain a molecular crystal structure encased in a transparent material, and the one on the upper right has a dark surface printed with circuitry. Organic-looking neuron-like dendrites float in space around the artificial neurons.
Schematic of bright and dark electronic states.
Left: Protein crystallography provided information about how actinium (magenta sphere, center) binds to a scaffold consisting of a synthetic molecule (magenta sticks) and a mammalian protein (gray surface). The structure when lanthanum (gray sphere and sticks) is substituted for actinium is shown for comparison. Right: Details of the interactions of the actinium with oxygen in the rings of the synthetic ligand.
Photo of a woman smiling, wearing green shirt, in front of green foliage.
Schematic illustration of the proposed reaction mechanism on CoMnOx. Co atoms shown as pink spheres, Mn in purple, O in red, H in white, and C in gray. The size of curved blue arrows show qualitatively the value of the reaction rate for comparison on different catalysts.
Left: A variant of the target domain for vaccines, CIDRα1.4 (light blue/yellow), in complex with a broadly reactive antibody, C7 (purple/maroon). Right: Superposition of the receptor protein, EPCR (gray surface), shows that C7 directly blocks the EPCR binding site (yellow helices), thus inhibiting the interaction responsible for severe malaria.