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Feature Story | Argonne National Laboratory

1,000th magnet for Advanced Photon Source Upgrade arrives at Argonne

When the APS Upgrade is complete, 1,321 powerful magnets will steer the beam of electrons that creates ultrabright X-rays for scientific discovery.

The 1,000th magnet for the Advanced Photon Source Upgrade has arrived at Argonne. 

The APS Upgrade will replace the current electron storage ring with a state-of-the-art model that will be made up of 1,321 powerful magnets. These magnets will maintain the electrons in a circular orbit (allowing them to be stored”), while keeping the size of the electron bunches as small as possible. This will allow the upgraded APS to generate X-ray beams 500 times brighter than the current facility, to enable new discoveries in a variety of fields.

The 1,000th magnet is an 8-pole fast corrector magnet, which is used to alter the trajectory of the electron beam as it circulates around the storage ring at nearly the speed of light. This magnet can steer the beam vertically and horizontally, and can control the size of the electron beam as well.

For more information on the magnets being used for the APS Upgrade, see this story

About the Advanced Photon Source

The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.

This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.