Facility Services

Need to perform an experiment that requires a 3-MeV Van de Graaff accelerator, a Cobalt-60 source (20,000 curies), or a saltcake facility pilot plant? What about a diesel-engine test facility, a high-temperature electrolyte furnace facility, or an aerosol laboratory? Argonne offers all of these (and scores more) to researchers from industry, academia, and other government laboratories.

Matt Neville of GeoSoilEnviroCARS uses the APS beamline to study earth materials.

Six Argonne facilities—including the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Climate Research Facility, the Center for Nanoscale Materials, and the Electron Microscopy Center—are DOE national user facilities or centers, available without charge to researchers publishing their findings in the open literature (fees are charged for proprietary work).

Argonne’s largest DOE user facility is the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a synchrotron-radiation light source used for basic and applied research. With a 1,104-meter circumference, the APS can hold a baseball park in its center, but it actually houses a complex of machines and instruments that produce X-rays more than one billion times as intense as a conventional X-ray source and sends them into a storage ring, ready for use by scientists stationed at 34 research sectors. Each sector has access to two beamlines or sources of radiation, an insertion device and a bending magnet. About 30 insertion-device and 45 bending-magnet experiments can be run simultaneously.

The Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS), a neutron-scattering facility built with equipment left over from earlier projects, has operated continuously since 1981, studying atomic arrangements and motions in liquids and solids. The IPNS hosts about 400 users each year, performing some 550 experiments.

The Argonne Tandem-Linac Accelerator Facility (ATLAS) is the world’s first superconducting linear accelerator for heavy ions at energies in the vicinity of the Coulomb barrier—the energy domain best suited for studying properties of the nucleus. Each year 200 to 300 researchers use ATLAS instrumentation including the Gammasphere, a third-generation gamma-ray spectrometer that is the world’s most powerful spectrometer for nuclear-structure research.—M.R.Y.

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