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Tag: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

  • Jim Sebek wins 2023 Lytle Award for decades of synchrotron problem solving and dedication

    Jim Sebek wins 2023 Lytle Award for decades of synchrotron problem solving and dedication

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    Newswise — Jim Sebek, an electrical engineer and physicist at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, will receive this year’s Farrel W. Lytle Award for countless contributions towards building, maintaining and operating the synchrotron for nearly four decades.

    The annual award recognizes staff members and SSRL users, and no one has done more to keep SSRL and its accelerator running over the years, SSRL senior scientist James Safranek said.

    “An attempt to describe the many times that Jim has led the effort to get SSRL accelerators back online would not take a book. It would require volumes,” Safranek said. “He takes an interest in solving any problem, whether it is with power supplies, beam diagnostics, computer controls or the HVAC system. If there is a problem, Jim is addressing it.”

    Over his 39 year career, Sebek has worked on almost all of the electrical systems at the Stanford Positron Electron Accelerating Ring (SPEAR), the particle accelerator at the heart of the synchrotron facility. His job description may be summarized as “fix whatever needs fixing,” Safranek said.

    Sebek credits his skills and knowledge to his mentors, who have been willing to spend time to teach their expertise, even during the busiest times at SSRL. Sebek actually started working at SLAC before he finished his undergraduate degree. He learned technical subjects related to the operation of an accelerator on his own, completing morning and evening classes at San Jose State University. He’d take classes that could help him solve immediate problems at SSRL and SPEAR – if a beam control system was acting oddly, for example, he’d take a course about feedback, he said.

    “I enjoy reading technical books and applying new ideas to SPEAR. In the past, I took math and science classes before or after work,” Sebek said. “This is what I like to do with my free time.”

    He went on to complete a PhD in accelerator physics at Stanford, after mentors at SSRL encouraged him to pursue his degree and publish papers based on his experience.

    Building a particle injector from scratch

    Sebek did not ease his way into working at SSRL: His initial job was to help build the dedicated electron injector for SPEAR that decoupled it from the SLAC linac. Until the 1980s, SPEAR was connected to SLAC’s linear accelerator and was used to study high-energy physics. In 1988, SPEAR transitioned into a stand-alone synchrotron radiation source that generates X-rays for SSRL. Sebek was hired as an electronics instrumentation engineer on the new injector project, which took about two years to finish. 

    The injector project offered opportunities to learn about all aspects of an accelerator.  During the project, Sebek learned another new subject: how to modify and repair large magnet power supply systems to help the synchrotron run reliably.

    “My career has been a progression along these lines: I find something that needs work, so I start working on it,” he said. “I migrate from one system to another and learn about them as I go.”

    He’s lost count of the total number of titles and roles he’s held. This broad experience is one of his favorite parts of his career.

    “In some positions at SLAC, you become highly specialized in one particular thing, but at SPEAR, things are different,” he said. “Our primary goal is to make sure the accelerator runs reliably, which means we have to know a lot about all of its parts. This helps us fix things outside of our immediate assignments.”

    His journey to SLAC started in 1979, when he left his hometown of Chicago for the San Francisco Bay Area. He did not know then that he would spend the better part of his life working as an engineer and physicist at SSRL. He liked to tinker with mechanical things and study math growing up, but he did not have a clear sense of what path he would travel on when he arrived in California.

    “SSRL and SLAC as a whole was a mystery to me before I started working here,” he said. “I’d heard about the lab and read a little about it, but until I started working here, I really did not know what went on inside.”

    The lab ended up being a “good working environment with good people who are a pleasure to work with,” he said. “I enjoyed it and stayed on.”

    His favorite project was researching, understanding, and ultimately curing beam instabilities that had caused operational issues in SPEAR2, the next generation of SPEAR.  He also enjoyed contributing to the design, construction, commissioning, and operation of SPEAR3.

    He remains fully engaged in keeping SSRL running. “But time goes on and nobody stays at SSRL forever,” Safranek said. “SSRL does have a succession issue – Jim is simply irreplaceable.”

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  • New SLAC-Stanford Battery Center targets roadblocks to a sustainable energy transition

    New SLAC-Stanford Battery Center targets roadblocks to a sustainable energy transition

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    Newswise — Menlo Park, Calif. – The Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University today announced the launch of a new joint battery center at SLAC. It will bring together the resources and expertise of the national lab, the university and Silicon Valley to accelerate the deployment of batteries and other energy storage solutions as part of the energy transition that’s essential for addressing climate change.

    A key part of this transition will be to decarbonize the world’s transportation systems and electric grids ­– to power them without fossil fuels. To do so, society will need to develop the capacity to store several hundred terawatt-hours of sustainably generated energy. Only about 1% of that capacity is in place today.

    Filling the enormous gap between what we have and what we need is one of the biggest challenges in energy research and development. It will require that experts in chemistry, materials science, engineering and a host of other fields join forces to make batteries safer, more efficient and less costly and manufacture them more sustainably from earth-abundant materials, all on a global scale. 

    The SLAC-Stanford Battery Center will address that challenge. It will serve as the nexus for battery research at the lab and the university, bringing together large numbers of faculty, staff scientists, students and postdoctoral researchers from SLAC and Stanford for research, education and workforce training. 

     “We’re excited to launch this center and to work with our partners on tackling one of today’s most pressing global issues,” said interim SLAC Director Stephen Streiffer. “The center will leverage the combined strengths of Stanford and SLAC, including experts and industry partners from a wide variety of disciplines, and provide access to the lab’s world-class scientific facilities. All of these are important to move novel energy storage technologies out of the lab and into widespread use.”

    Expert research with unique tools

    Research and development at the center will span a vast range of systems – from understanding chemical reactions that store energy in electrodes to designing battery materials at the nanoscale, making and testing devices, improving manufacturing processes and finding ways to scale up those processes so they can become part of everyday life. 

    “It’s not enough to make a game-changing battery material in small amounts,” said Jagjit Nanda, a SLAC distinguished scientist, Stanford adjunct professor and executive director of the new center, whose background includes decades of battery research at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We have to understand the manufacturing science needed to make it in larger quantities on a massive scale without compromising on performance.”

    Longstanding collaborations between SLAC and Stanford researchers have already produced many important insights into how batteries work and how to make them smaller, lighter, safer and more powerful. These studies have used machine learning to quickly identify the most promising battery materials from hundreds made in the lab, and measured the properties of those materials and the nanoscale details of battery operation at the lab’s synchrotron X-ray facility. SLAC’s X-ray free-electron laser is available, as well, for fundamental studies of energy-related materials and processes. 

    SLAC and Stanford also pioneered the use of cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), a technique developed to image biology in atomic detail, to get the first clear look at finger-like growths that can degrade lithium-ion batteries and set them on fire. This technique has also been used to probe squishy layers that build up on electrodes and must be carefully managed, in research performed at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES).

    Nanda said the center will also focus on making energy storage more sustainable, for instance by choosing materials that are abundant, easy to recycle and can be extracted in a way that’s less costly and produces fewer emissions.

    A unique collaboration in the heart of Silicon Valley 

    Battery Center Director Will Chueh, an associate professor at Stanford and faculty scientist at SLAC, emphasized that the center is located in the middle of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture, two miles from the Stanford campus and a short walk away from large, world-class scientific facilities that only a national lab can provide. This generates advantages that would be impossible for any single partner to achieve, including outstanding educational and training opportunities for Stanford students and postdocs that will play an outsized role in shaping the next generation of energy researchers. 

    “There’s no other place in the world,” Chueh said, “where all of this comes together.”

    A pilot project for the center began in 2020 with two battery laboratories in SLAC’s Arrillaga Science Center where Stanford students and postdoctoral researchers have been synthesizing battery materials and evaluating devices. 

    The center is operated by SLAC’s Applied Energy Division and Stanford’s Precourt Energy Institute. Major funding for battery research at SLAC comes from the DOE Office of Science and Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) and Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser are DOE Office of Science user facilities.

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  • SLAC, Stanford researchers make a new type of quantum material with a dramatic distortion pattern

    SLAC, Stanford researchers make a new type of quantum material with a dramatic distortion pattern

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    Newswise — Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have created a new type of quantum material whose atomic scaffolding, or lattice,  has been dramatically warped into a herringbone pattern.

    The resulting distortions are “huge” compared to those achieved in other materials, said Woo Jin Kim, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC who led the study. 

    “This is a very fundamental result, so it’s hard to make predictions about what may or may not come out of it, but the possibilities are exciting,” said SLAC/Stanford Professor and SIMES Director Harold Hwang. 

    “Based on theoretical modeling from members of our team, it looks like the new material has intriguing magnetic, orbital and charge order properties that we plan to investigate further,” he said. Those are some of the very properties that scientists think give quantum materials their surprising characteristics. 

    The research team described their work in a paper published in Nature today.

    High-rises versus octahedrons

    The herringbone-patterned material is the first demonstration of something called the Jahn-Teller (JT) effect in a layered material with a flat, planar lattice, like a high-rise building with evenly spaced floors.  

    The JT effect addresses the dilemma an electron faces when it approaches an ion – an atom that’s missing one or more electrons. 

    Just like a ball rolling along the ground will stop and settle in a low spot, the electron will seek out and occupy the vacancy in the atom’s electron orbitals that has the lowest energy state. But sometimes there are two vacancies with equally low energies. What then? 

    If the ion is in a molecule or embedded in a crystal, the JT effect distorts the surrounding atomic lattice in a way that leaves only one vacancy at the lowest energy state, solving the electron’s problem, Hwang said. 

    And when the whole crystal lattice consists of JT ions, in some cases the overall crystal structure warps, so the electron’s dilemma is cooperatively solved for all the ions. 

    That’s what happened in this study.

    “The Jahn-Teller effect creates strong interactions between the electrons and between the electrons and the lattice,” Hwang said. “This is thought to play key roles in the physics of a number of quantum materials.” 

    The JT effect had already been demonstrated for single molecules and for 3D crystalline materials that consist of ions arranged in octahedral or tetrahedral structures. In fact, JT oxides based on manganese or copper exhibit colossal magnetoresistance and high-temperature superconductivity – leading scientists to wonder what would happen in materials based on other elements or having a different structure.

    In this study, the SIMES researchers turned a material made of cobalt, calcium and oxygen (CaCoO2.5), which has a different stacking of octahedral and tetrahedral layers and is known as brownmillerite,  into a layered material (CaCoO2) where the JT effect could take hold. They did it with a chemical trick developed at SIMES a few years ago to make the superconductivity-nickel-oxide-material”>first nickel oxide superconductor.

    Pulling out Jenga blocks

    Kim synthesized a thin film of brownmillerite and chemically removed single layers of oxygen atoms from its lattice, much like players carefully remove blocks from a Jenga tower. The lattice collapsed and settled into a flat, planar configuration with alternating layers containing negatively charged cobalt ions ­– the JT ions ­– and positively charged calcium ions. 

    Each cobalt ion tried to pull calcium ions from the layers above and below it, Kim said. 

    “This tug-of-war between adjacent layers led to a beautiful pattern of distortions that reflects the best and most harmonious compromise between the forces at play,” he said. “And the resulting lattice distortions are huge compared to those in other materials ­– equal to 25% of the distance between ions in the lattice.”

    Hwang said the research team will be exploring this remarkable new electronic configuration with X-ray tools available at SLAC and elsewhere. “We also wonder what will happen if we can dope this material – replacing some atoms with others to change the number of electrons that are free to move around,” he said. “There are many exciting possibilities.”

    Researchers from Cornell University, the Pohang Accelerator Laboratory in South Korea and the Center for Nanoscale Materials Sciences, a DOE Office of Science user facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, contributed to this work. It received major funding from the DOE Office of Science and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems Initiative. 

     

    SLAC is a vibrant multiprogram laboratory that explores how the universe works at the biggest, smallest and fastest scales and invents powerful tools used by scientists around the globe. With research spanning particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology, materials, chemistry, bio- and energy sciences and scientific computing, we help solve real-world problems and advance the interests of the nation.

    SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

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