Brighter Light, Sharper Science: Inside Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source Upgrade

Imagine seeing not just the shape of something, but its chemical fingerprint—down to the atom. 

At Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source, that’s exactly what researchers do by using a special kind of light to study everything from battery materials to moon rocks. And, we’re upgrading the source to reveal even more than ever before. Here’s how we do it.

To study a sample, we shine waves of light on it. You’re familiar with the visible spectrum—the rainbow of colors we can see with the naked eye. But light exists far outside what humans perceive, and, the more colors of light we can use, the more information we gather. At the ALS, that includes infrared, ultraviolet, and X-rays.

A doctor’s X-ray produces a simple silhouette. At the ALS, we can pick from many more “colors” of X-rays, so instead of a flat outline, we see a rich, detailed picture of a sample that reveals its chemical or electronic properties too. 

Now, the ALS is upgrading to be an even more powerful light source. Currently, our light isn’t very coherent. The waves of light are randomly out of phase with each other. That means that the peaks and valleys aren’t lined up. So, when the waves hit the sample, different parts of the sample are struck by waves at different points in their cycle—some at a peak, some at a trough, and some in the middle. But, the sample itself is complex and isn’t completely uniform. So, measurements we make won’t tell us if any disorder or irregularities are coming from the light or the sample. All the disorder gets mixed together, and we don’t get the true nature of the sample. 

We’re changing out the equipment that produces the light, replacing the magnets of our particle accelerator with newer, more compact ones, arranged in just the right way to produce coherent light.

The upgraded, coherent light will be organized in phase, with the peaks and valleys aligned. With coherent light interacting with the sample, the information we get from the experiment is even more useful for detecting disorder or anomalies in the sample that we could not see before. 

Without coherence, we’re just getting a blurred average of all the data we collect, which produces a smooth looking picture. With coherence, we can see something more like a fingerprint, with each speckle revealing something about the sample. 

Take a quantum material like a superconductor, where tiny irregularities can determine whether it works at all. With coherent light, we could pinpoint that disorder and help design materials that carry electricity with zero loss.

The upgraded ALS, with brighter and coherent light, will open up new doors for researching quantum materials, batteries, microelectronics, and more—helping scientists see the world at a new level of detail.

To learn more, visit ALS.LBL.GOV.