Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is upgrading its Advanced Light Source to generate coherent X-ray beams orders of magnitude brighter than its existing setup, Berkeley Lab announced. The project, known as ALS-U, will allow researchers to directly measure defects and observe quantum states in real time within a billionth of a second at the nanoscale.
For more than three decades, the third-generation synchrotron light source has supplied soft X-ray and ultraviolet instrumentation to study quantum phenomena. The upgrade will narrow the facility's X-ray beam focusing capability from the 10-micrometer spot size of the current MAESTRO instrument to less than 25 nanometers. Berkeley Lab is also evaluating further upgrades below 10 nanometers through a technique called Ultimate NanoARPES to locate individual defects in superconducting qubits and exotic metals.
Superconductors and Spintronics
Researchers have used the facility's Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (ARPES) tools to map electron energy and momentum in emerging materials. In 2022, Massachusetts Institute of Technology associate professor Riccardo Comin used MAESTRO to measure electron velocities linked to superconductivity in Kagome metals. At Rice University, associate professor Ming Yi used spin-resolved ARPES to track electron behavior in indium, tantalum, and sulfur crystal compounds to inform future spintronic devices. Eli Rotenberg, lead of the ALS ARPES program, noted that the brighter beams will help determine how specific nanoscale impurities break quantum coherence in computing qubits.
Scattering Instruments and Neuromorphic Systems
Coherent soft X-ray scattering experiments currently performed on the COSMIC instrument will transfer to a planned instrument called FLEXON, short for FLuctuation and EXcitation of Orders in the Nanoscale. FLEXON will provide X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS) to measure nanosecond charge and spin fluctuations alongside a coherent X-ray reflection microscope developed by ALS scientists Sophie Morley and Sujoy Roy with Comin.
University of California San Diego associate professor Alex Frañó will use the XPCS capability to track correlated electron dynamics at the nanometer scale for neuromorphic computing systems designed to emulate biological neural networks. Managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, Berkeley Lab was founded in 1931 and has been associated with 17 Nobel Prizes.
