ALS renewal moves forward

As the result of an extensive long-term planning process involving all its stakeholders—management, staff, and users—the ALS has seen its future and is aggressively moving ahead to implement its vision for keeping the facility at the cutting edge for the next 2–3 decades. The evolving strategic plan now in place aims to renew the ALS so it can address a new generation of fundamental questions about size dependent and dimensional-confinement phenomena at the nanoscale; correlation and complexity in physical, biological, and environmental systems; and temporal evolution, assembly, dynamics and ultrafast phenomena. The renewal spans three areas: (1) increased staffing at beamlines to support the growing user community and safety professionals to keep an increasingly complex facility hazard free; (2) implementing advances in accelerator, insertion device, beamline, and detector technology that will make it possible for ALS users to address emerging grand scientific and technological challenges with incisive world-class tools; and (3) construction of a user support building and guest housing that will increase the safety and user friendliness of the ALS by providing users office, meeting, experiment staging, and laboratory space for their work and on-site accommodations at reasonable rates.