For more than 20 years, ChemMatCARS—a National Science Foundation program located at Argonne National Laboratory—has provided state-of-the-art synchrotron X-ray facilities for molecular science and engineering researchers the world over.
A new $17.35 million grant from the National Science Foundation will allow ChemMatCARS to expand its offerings and double the amount of beam time available at Sector 15 of Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source. Sector 15 is one of three sectors managed by the University of Chicago’s Center for Advanced Radiation Sources (CARS) that lets scientists who would not otherwise have access apply for beam time to advance their research.
“ChemMatCARS enables users from around the country and the world to study crystals, liquid interfaces and elemental distributions in a wide variety of materials,” said ChemMatCARS Principal Investigator and Director Matthew Tirrell, professor and dean emeritus at the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
Of the three sectors CARS manages, BioCARS focuses on structural biological research and GSECARS supports the earth, planetary, soil and environmental research communities. NSF’s ChemMatCARS provides beam time for chemistry, materials science, biology, and engineering research.
“Nearly 2,000 scientists and graduate students from about 300 institutions worldwide have used ChemMatCARS facilities since the beginning of operations in 2002,” said ChemMatCARS Executive Director and Project Manager Binhua Lin, a research professor at UChicago’s James Franck Institute. “Over 1,200 research papers have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, many appearing in leading journals such as Science, Nature, ACS-Central Science, JACS, PNAS, PRL, among others.”
It also helps develop early-career researchers, said Co-Principal Investigator and Deputy Director Mark Schlossman, a physics professor at the University of Illinois Chicago.
“ChemMatCARS contributes to the specialized education, training, and career development of students, postdocs, and faculty in forefront synchrotron X-ray studies in molecular science,” Schlossman said. “X-ray novices can productively access so-called ‘experts-only’ techniques with support from our beamline scientists, and our high-quality data analysis software helps accelerate the process of producing publishable results.”
With this new grant, those researchers will be able to access not only a new beamline, but will see improvements to the current synchrotron.
“This most current renewal changes the facility’s capabilities significantly in two ways,” Tirrell said. “It helps support the operation of a new second beamline for crystallography and liquid interface scattering, greatly increasing our capacity to serve the user community. Furthermore, we are beginning operation with a major upgrade to the synchrotron itself, which will greatly increase the intensity and coherence of the X-ray beam and, in turn, will permit faster data acquisition with vastly improved spatial resolution.”
Small-molecule serial crystallography, advanced instrumentation to study bilayer biomembranes, small X-ray beams to study micro/nanocrystals, and lower energy X-rays on the new beamline are among the improved capabilities this grant will enable, helping expand the frontiers of science across institutions and around the world.
“The partnership with ChemMatCARS for more than two decades has been amazing,” said Laurent Chapon, associate lab director for photon sciences, director of the APS and director of the APS Upgrade project. “We look forward to the scientific discoveries that will come as a result of the enhanced capabilities of the beamline following the APS Upgrade.”