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Recovery Act Funds Accelerate LCLS Instruments

(Photo)
The Far Experimental Hall will house two of the LCLS instruments whose development has been accelerated by ARRA funds. (Photo by Brad Plummer.)

The first portion of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding allocated to SLAC includes funds to accelerate the design and construction of three Linac Coherent Light Source instruments: the X-ray Pump Probe, the Coherent X-ray Imaging and the X-ray Correlation Spectroscopy instruments.

The LCLS Ultrafast Science Instruments project, or LUSI, which is building the instruments, has received $33.6 million in Recovery Act Funding this year to complete the instruments sooner than previously planned.

"This money means that we can ramp up our schedule, purchasing parts and materials earlier than expected," said LUSI Project Manager Tom Fornek. "This way we pump money into the economy quicker."

Prior to the announcement of the Recovery Act funding, the LUSI project planned to build these instruments one at a time over the course of several years, with installation of the final instrument scheduled for 2012. But now that the money for the three instruments has been released early, more work can be done in parallel. This will allow LUSI project to be completed earlier than planned.

Using the LCLS's ultrafast pulses of X-rays, these instruments will make images and even stop-motion movies of single molecules, addressing questions in a wide range of fields, including chemistry, medicine and materials science. And, thanks to the new funding, they will be able to do it earlier than expected.

This story is the third in a series about Recovery Act projects at SLAC. See also "SLAC Puts Federal Stimulus Funds to Work" and "FACET: Toward the Tabletop Accelerator."

—Kelen Tuttle
  SLAC Today, July 9, 2009