Workshop on High Energy X-ray Techniques 2020, HEXT-2020

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed workshop on High Energy X-ray techniques, HEXT, at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) is unique in its goal to provide participating students, primarily from institutions in the NSF Partnership for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) program, the knowledge and skills needed to strategically plan, conduct and interpret synchrotron experiments to answer questions specific to their research interests in material science. The PREM institutions are Minority Serving Institutions with a student population largely underrepresented in the field of materials research. The workshop will consist of three main components: 1) Lectures by CHESS staff scientists that cover the fundamentals of synchrotron methods and how these can be applied to materials research; 2) Hands-on demonstrations where participants will collect and process data on CHESS beamlines; and 3) Instruction and coaching on how to write a successful proposal for beamtime, with the opportunity for personalized feedback from CHESS scientists. At the conclusion of the workshop, the participants will have the knowledge and demonstrated skills to be productive members of the CHESS user community. The HEXT-2020 workshop will occur as part of the CHESS Users’ Meeting in June 2020. Workshop participants will be able to attend sessions of the Users’ meeting featuring updates of the facility operation, strategic planning and science presentations, as well as social events (meeting dinner, tour of CHESS). Attendees of the workshop will also participate in a poster session to share their scientific interests and learn about research at CHESS. There they will also have the opportunity to network with students already using synchrotron facilities, with the CHESS staff scien-tists who are responsible for x-ray beamlines, and with PIs who are facility users (from early career scientists to world-renowned distinguished researchers, all working in diverse fields). The targeted audience for this workshop will have diverse scientific interests and will be new to the synchrotron community. Therefore, the workshop will cover a broad range of synchrotron methods—such as diffraction, spectroscopy, and imaging—that can be applied to many materials systems. Both lectures and hands-on sessions will focus on the fundamentals of the methods, with a special emphasis on how these techniques can be applied to materials systems. The experiments using CHESS beamlines will give participants firsthand experience with what it takes to conduct research at a synchrotron. By combining these educational activities with practice in preparing proposals, this workshop will uniquely equip participants to become active members in the CHESS user community. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.