The brightest gets brighter

The brightest storage ring-generated x-ray beams in the Western Hemisphere are created by Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) and are used by more than 5,000 scientists worldwide. A planned upgrade to the APS will reconfigure the facility’s magnets (its “lattice”) to enhance this world-class resource. The addition of long superconducting devices will increase brightness by an order of magnitude for x-rays above 20 keV. The upgrade will also accommodate systems for dramatically reducing the x-ray pulse length, giving the APS a unique position for enabling time-resolved science with hard x-rays. Without disruption to current operating modes, the upgrade will result in an improved source of high-energy, high-brightness, tunable x-rays for scientific research.

When massive compute power is elegant

Scientists at work on the APS upgrade are challenged with optimizing the nonlinear dynamics to provide both sufficient dynamic aperture (to ensure high-injection efficiency) and momentum aperture (to ensure sufficient beam lifetime). To tackle this challenge, researchers will pair the extreme computing power of the ALCF’s Blue Gene/P with the APS-developed code “elegant” to create complex particle-tracking simulations.

Providing faster solutions today, building resources for tomorrow

The vast compute power of the Blue Gene/P gives scientists at work on the APS upgrade the ability to resolve more challenging problems faster. To keep pace with the community’s seemingly insatiable appetite for increased brightness, researchers will use a portion of their ALCC allocation to advance important concept work for next-generation “ultimate” storage rings.