From left to right: Advanced Light Source scientists Tony Warwick, Sujoy Roy, and David Shapiro at the COSMIC beamline. (Credit: Lori Tamura/Berkeley Lab)
A next-generation X-ray beamline now operating at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) brings together a unique set of capabilities to measure the properties of materials at the nanoscale. Called COSMIC, for Coherent Scattering and Microscopy, this X-ray beamline at Berkeley Lab's Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) allows scientists to probe working batteries and other active chemical reactions, and to reveal new details about magnetism and correlated electronic materials. COSMIC has two branches that focus on different types of X-ray experiments: one for X-ray imaging experiments and one for scattering experiments. In both cases, X-rays interact with a sample and are measured in a way that provides, structural, chemical, electronic, or magnetic information about samples. The beamline is also intended as an important technological bridge toward the planned ALS upgrade, dubbed ALS-U that would maximize its capabilities. Now, after a first-year ramp-up during which staff tested and tuned its components, the scientific results from its earliest experiments are expected to get published in journals later this year. A study published earlier this month , based primarily on work at a related ALS beamline, successfully demonstrated a technique known as ptychographic computed tomography that mapped the location of reactions inside lithium-ion batteries in 3-D.
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