The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science (SC) has given DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory approval in the next phase of the $815M upgrade of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a premier national research facility that equips scientists for discoveries that impact our technologies, economy, and national security.
DOE’s Critical Decision 3 (CD-3) milestone approval is a significant recognition of DOE’s acceptance of Argonne’s final design report for the complex APS Upgrade (APS-U), and authorizes the laboratory to proceed with procurements needed to build the nation’s brightest energy, storage-ring based X-ray source. The upgrade positions the APS to be a global leader among the new generation of storage-ring light sources that is now emerging.
Argonne’s APS, which works like a giant X-ray microscope, is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Scientific User Facilities Division of the Basic Energy Sciences Program in the Office of Science. It produces extremely bright, focused X-rays that peer through dense materials and illuminate the structure and chemistry of matter at the molecular and atomic level. By way of comparison, the X-rays produced at today’s APS are up to one billion times brighter than the X-rays produced in a typical dentist office.
