In 2017 I was fortunate to be selected along with 61 other graduate students to participate in this school. The first week we spent at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) in the Argonne National Lab (ANL), and the second was spent at both the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) and the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
In November of 2017 I attended this workshop at the APS designed to train users on the Coherent Nuclear Resonant Scattering by Single Crystals software (CONUSS). This software was written and distributed by Dr. Wolfgang Sturhahn, who gave lectures alongside other prominent Inelastic Scattering experts, and provided hands-on experience with the software.
Three months after the NRS workshop (Jan-Feb 2018), I got to work with Sector 3 at the APS again, this time for an experiment on the beamline itself. We usead a diamond-anvil cell with ethanol as the pressure medium to view the Nuclear Forward Scattering (the equivalent of Mossbauer spectroscopy) of several Europium-based compounds.The experiment was intense; three days of 24-hour monitoring between two people. The equipment at the beamline heats up and cools down on a very small scale based on the ground temperature under the building, which is enough to move the apparatus out of focus! It was a very cool experiment, and I got to go back in November of 2018 to complete the full range of compounds.
In September 2018, my PI, a colleague, and I took a trip to Hamburg, Germany to meet with collaborators for multiple projects, and tour the DESY beamline facility. It was a very different experience from the APS, which exists on the large and secluded ANL campus. DESY is right in the middle of the city, with residences blocks from the main gate. Additionally, the electron beam at DESY is used to power the X-Ray Free Electron Laser, which is technically in a different suburb of the city!
The collaborators I got to speak with have offices at the XFEL facility. In 2017 I was fortunate to be selected among some ~70 graduate students to participate in this school. The first week we spent at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) in the Argonne National Lab (ANL), and the second was spent at both the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) and the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
During a stop in Geneva, Switzerland, we had an opportunity to visit the ESRF for a daytrip via train. While there, we got to view the experimental setup at Beamline ID12, where they can perform high-pressure X-Ray Absorption Spectroscopy measurements on elements normally considered impossible due to a custom, perforated diamond anvil setup. The mountains around the facility were very impressive, as were the plans to update the synchrotron; the ESRF will be closed for at least a year to exchange their hardware and build a newer, updated beamline with higher flux. It was a shame we were only there for a day.
It was a season of synchrotron experiments. In October of 2018, I worked with the beamline scientists at HB-2A to do variable temperature neutron diffraction on a magnetic sample in order to ascertain its magnetic structure. The ferromagnetic nature of the substance begged a more suitable experiment, and we planned to perform a polarized neutron diffraction experiment in January of 2019.