On July 1, LANSCE began beam delivery at both the Weapons Neutron Research Facility and the Manuel Lujan Jr. Neutron Scattering Center, meeting LANSCE Director Paul Lisowski's stated goal of making neutrons and protons available to users by that date. July 1 also marked the start of the Lujan Center's scheduled National User program.
"LANSCE employees should be extremely proud of the hard work that has been done over the last several months, getting the accelerator, beam lines and instrumentation ready for operation, and completing important upgrades and construction," Lisowski said. "We have met our goal of providing neutrons and protons to all LANSCE users by July 1 and will continue to work hard to ensure safe, reliable operation for all users-both internal and external to the Laboratory."
LANSCE comprises a high-power 800-million-electron-volt proton linear accelerator, a proton storage ring, production targets at the Lujan Center and the Weapons Neutron Research Facility, and a variety of associated experimental areas and spectrometers. LANSCE provides proton beams for dynamic experiments supporting defense science research at WNR and the Proton Radiography Facility, and for production of ultra-cold neutrons for basic science experiments at WNR. For its two national user programs, LANSCE produces intense beams of pulsed neutrons at both the Lujan Center and the Weapons Neutron Research Facility, which provide the Laboratory and U.S. scientific community with the capability to perform experiments that support both defense and civilian research.
"We want everyone at the Laboratory and all of our colleagues across the nation and internationally to know that the Lujan Center is open for research," Lujan Center Director Alan Hurd said. "We've successfully dealt with the infrastructure and facility issues that have been a problem in past years and we're working as hard as we can to get reliable neutrons out to all of our users."
This year's run cycle at the Lujan Center represents the first full cycle since 1997. Full run cycles, around six months in duration, have not been possible the last few years due to facility upgrades and safety concerns that kept the facility in stand-down mode. An abbreviated run cycle was conducted in 2000 for a limited number of users. Reestablishing the Lujan Center as a reliable provider of neutrons for research was one of the key directives that emerged from a Feb. 2001 report on LANSCE's Lujan Center by DOE's Office of Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, known as BESAC.
During the 2001 run cycle at the Lujan Center, over 100 experiments are scheduled to run on six user-program instruments. Experiments, which range from studies of new materials to biological protein studies, typically run from two to 10 days and often involve teams of researchers. In this year's cycle, 30 percent of Lujan Center users are from divisions across the Laboratory, and the remaining 70 percent are drawn from external experimental teams.
The external teams represent approximately 35 U.S. academic institutions, five national laboratories, seven foreign academic institutions, two members of industry and two U.S. government agencies. International users come from as far away as Germany, Slovenia and Japan. The Lujan Center expects to host approximately 150 unique users over the five-and-a-half-month run cycle that ends in mid-December.
Holger Kohlmann, a postdoctoral researcher from the High Pressure Science and Engineering Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas was one of several external users who conducted experiments at the Lujan Center during its first week of operation this year. Kohlmann's experiment used the Lujan Center's High Intensity Powder Diffractometer to study the crystal structure and bonding of highly pressurized metal hydrides, materials that could be used to store hydrogen for possible use in fuel cells or other energy-conversion devices.
"We had a really successful run at Lujan," he said. "We had extremely good support from the Lujan scientists who worked with us into the evenings and even on the July 4th holiday. The beam was up four-and-a-half of the five days we were there, which allowed us to meet all our goals."
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