Sarah Gager / WSKG News
Joel Brock, Director of CHESS, in the tunnel of the particle accelerator
ITHACA, NY (WSKG) – Students running around the track at Cornell University’s Charles F. Berman field might not realize that about five stories down there’s another track sending atoms circling – a particle accelerator. It was shut down this week for massive upgrades.
Joel Brock, Director of Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source—or CHESS—ducks under machinery to get into the tunnel of the particle accelerator.
“This is the tunnel part. Now you can see it’s round. This was bored like a subway tunnel in the early 60s and the view doesn’t change much from here on a round.”
Sarah Gager / WSKG News
Joel Brock, Director of CHESS, ducks under machinery to get into the tunnel of the particle accelerator
If you could peer around the corner, you’d see a repeating pattern of huge orange and blue magnets.
The magnets steer matter around the tunnel at nearly the speed of light. Researchers harness x-rays made from the excitation of electrons to peer inside the smallest parts of an atom. For instance, companies testing material for airplanes can see where it starts to break down at the molecular level.
Brock’s been with Cornell since 1989, long enough to see some changes.
“Back in the old days, using film, you had to take a photograph. We had a dark room. People used to come work for a week, and now it’s like four or five hours to do the whole thing and they leave with a solved structure. So, yeah, the world has changed since 1980.”
Back then, when this was used for particle collisions, electrons and positrons circling in different directions would crash into each other revealing all the different molecular parts that make up matter, but that kind of research hasn’t happened at Cornell since 2008.
Sarah Gager / WSKG News
Workspace at CHESS where Michael Rossman solved the structure of the common cold in the late 70s/early 80s
The upgrades will take out a sixth of the ring that was geared more for particle collisions and fine tune it for x-rays, in part, by adding more undulators which excite electrons. It will also send positrons in the same direction.
The project is funded by New York State. Brock said without the upgrades, they wouldn’t be relevant.
“We wouldn’t be internationally competitive anymore and we’d lose our funding. Right now, CHESS is funded by the National Science Foundation as a national user facility. The foundation wants world class facilities. We have to be the best use of the taxpayers money, which means, every five to ten years, we have to upgrade to stay at the forefront.”
Sarah Gager / WSKG News
A man works in front of new magnets for the upgrade
A $15-million state grant funds 150 jobs at Cornell. It’s hoped additional people will be hired by the New York manufacturers who are providing most of the materials. The upgrades should be done early next year.
The university is developing a new type of particle accelerator which is more energy efficient. Brock calls it the future of particle accelerators.
Correction: Cornell expects to retain 150 jobs with funding from NYS. An earlier version of this story said 290 jobs. The Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based ScienceS and Education currently employs 290 people.
Funny you mention Michael Rossmann. In the ’70s Michael headed , and still does, the other, and much bigger crystallography group at Purdue when I was a postdoc with Struther Arnott doing what some have described as the ‘crystallography of non-crystalline materials’ (fiber diffraction). He was challenging and difficult but utterly focused. In my case that meant he opposed a tenure track position for me, mainly because ranting it would have prevented from taking over the space for his own activities. Years later I had to serve as his host at Polyetch, in Brooklyn, when he received a Fankuchen award requiring a lecture at Poly. I was the closest thing to a protein crystallographer in the Institute and no one knew our history, so there I was, the host.
I did my best for him despite deep seated differences and in the evening, as people were leaving from a Brooklyn Heights restaurant, Michael asked me to stay behind for a private discussion over brandy ( highly unusual as Michael had largely abandoned alcohol by then). In that session he admitted he had made a mistake in opposing me, something he rarely did. He also gained my lifetime respect for I understood that his goal was not directed against e, only at the advancement of what he saw as most important, protein and virus crystallography /structure. We remain friends and I have an infinite respect for his dedication, costly as it may have been to me personally.
Thanks for sharing!
Apologies for the odd typo above