1. ELLIPTICAL POLARIZATION BEAMLINE SHEDS LIGHT ON FIRST SUBJECT
Contact: Contact: JDBozek@lbl.gov

Beamline 4.0, which receives light from the new elliptical polarization undulator, had its first users during the two-bunch operation of March 2-14. Gyorgy Snell and Nora Berrah (Western Michigan University) and Burkhard Langer (Max Born Institute, Germany) used circularly polarized light to conduct spin-resolved Auger spectroscopy of xenon and krypton gas. A Mott time-of-flight spectrometer was installed with two stages of differential pumping to protect the high vacuum of the beamline and storage ring from the relatively high pressures of gas in the experiment. As the beamline does not yet have a monochromator, the endstation was installed after the first mirror and used the "pink" (unmonochromatized) beam of the undulator to ionize the samples. Since the experiment was concerned with Auger electrons (which are emitted when a core vacancy is filled by an outer-shell electron), whose line widths are not sensitive to the bandpass of the exciting radiation, the lack of a monochromator was not a negative factor. Rather, the high intensity of the photon beam allowed weak lines to be obtained with very high count rates.

2. ALS MICROSCOPY REVIEW HELD
Contact: GFKrebs@lbl.gov

As a third-generation synchrotron light source optimized for high brightness, the ALS has accepted the mission of developing a world-leading scientific program in soft x-ray microscopy and spatially resolved spectroscopy. At its recent meetings, the ALS Science Policy Board has vigorously reaffirmed this mission. To assess progress toward attaining this goal, last fall the ALS Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) established an ad-hoc review committee consisting of both SAC members and outside experts. SAC member Janos Kirz (State University of New York at Stony Brook) and Paul Hansma (University of California at Santa Barbara) served as co-chairs for the review, which was held at the ALS on February 24 and 25. At the review, the committee heard presentations from spokespersons for the user groups and toured the ALS spectromicroscopy facilities. The presentations were divided into sessions on science, instrumentation, and future plans. Specific recommendations will be contained in the committee's report to the SAC, which must then approve the findings before forwarding the report to the Berkeley Lab and ALS managements.

3. SYMPOSIUM HONORS FORMER LAB DIRECTOR DAVID SHIRLEY
Contact: alsuser@lbl.gov

Friends and colleagues of David Shirley, former Berkeley Lab director and internationally recognized spectroscopy pioneer, gathered for a day-long symposium on Monday in honor of Shirley's 65th birthday. As Laboratory director, Shirley championed the idea of building the ALS and secured funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. The symposium addressed advances in spectroscopy and the structure of matter, touching on the various scientific questions that Dr. Shirley and his group explored over the years. It included sessions on hyperfine interactions, electron spectroscopy of solids, atoms and molecules, and theory and technology. The event was organized by Guenter Kaindl (Freie Universitaet, Berlin), Zahid Hussain (ALS), and Louis J. Terminello (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). Sponsors included the ALS, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Hewlett-Packard Company, and Baylor Triplett.

4. RECENT PUBLICATIONS: QUANTUM WELLS IN THIN FILMS
Contact: alsrooms@lbl.gov

Quantum-well research conducted at the ALS is attracting attention in major publications on both sides of the Atlantic. A paper by R.K. Kawakami, E. Rotenberg, Hyuk J. Choi, Ernesto J. Escorcia-Aparicio, M.O. Bowen, J.H. Wolfe, E. Arenholz, Z.D. Zhang, N.V. Smith, and Z.Q. Qiu was featured in the March 11 issue of Nature (Vol. 398, pp. 132-134). The Letter to Nature, entitled "Quantum Well States in Copper Thin Films," extends work reported in ALSNews, Volume 112 (September 30, 1998). The group's recent photoemission studies reveal the spatial variation of the quantum-well wave function within a thin copper film. A perspective by S.D. Bader on this and related work appears in the same issue (S.D. Bader, "Quantum Engineering: Probing Magnetism in the Well," Nature 398, 104), and the work is also mentioned in a March 12 Science Magazine perspective by Franz Himpsel [F.J. Himpsel, "Enhanced: Mirrors for Electrons," Science 283 (5408), 1655].

5. WHO'S IN TOWN: A SAMPLING OF ALS USERS

To highlight the richness of our user community and help introduce recent arrivals, we offer this listing of some of the experimenters who will be collecting data during the next two weeks at the ALS.

Beamline 1.4.3: Felicia Hendrickson and Robert Glaeser (Univ. of California, Berkeley) will study FTIR spectra of bacteriorhodopsin microcrystals.

Beamline 9.0.2.1: Nancy Forde and Laurie Butler (Univ. of Chicago) will be using the chemical dynamics beamline to study the photochemistry of alkylamines.

Beamline 9.0.2.2: Branko Ruscic (Argonne National Laboratory) and Gary Jarvis (Berkeley Lab) will be using pulsed-field ionization (PFI), photoelectron-photoion coincidence as a technique to study PFI of radicals (formed by laser photolysis) that are free of contamination from parent molecules.

Beamline 10.3.1: David Shuh's research group (Berkeley Lab) will be studying phosphorus and neptunium uptake in bone.

Beamline 10.3.2: Martin Wilding (Univ. of California, Davis) will be investigating the inhomogeneous distribution of lanthanum in lanthanum-bearing calcium silicate glass. Also, Mark Conrad and William Stringfellow (Berkeley Lab) will be looking at the uptake of nutrients by lichen from Hawaiian basalt minerals.

6. OPERATIONS UPDATE
Contact: RMMiller@lbl.gov

Beam reliability for the last two weeks (March 15-28) was 98% for user shifts. There were no significant outages.

Long-term and weekly operations schedules are available on the Web (http://www-als.lbl.gov/als/accelinfo.html). Weekly operations scheduling meetings are held on Fridays at 3:30 p.m. in the Building 6 conference room. The Accelerator Status Hotline at (510) 486-6766 (ext. 6766 from Lab phones) features a recorded message giving up-to-date information on the operational status of the accelerator.