Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices
News from CAMD
Lorraine Day
The J. Bennett Johnston Sr. Center for Advanced Microstructures and
Devices: CAMD just completed its first exposures on the new High Energy
X-ray Lithography Wiggler Beamline during the week of August 23-27. The
facility is then undergoing a shutdown of approximately 3 weeks (8/28 thru
9/20) to prepare the front ends for three protein crystallography beamlines
which have been jointly funded by NSF and NIH. Needless to say, all this
activity keeps Lorraine hopping with several late nights (or should I say
wee hours of the morning). As with the commissioning of any new beamline
and especially insertion devices, we have been faced with the usual
"radiation suspects". Configurational changes will occur during the
shutdown which should lessen the impact of the wiggler on the total
radiation field observed in the vicinity of the beamline. Additional
shielding shall be placed both within the Wiggler frontend and at the
thin septum which developed a small skyshine problem last week. For one
week we instituted administrative controls during injection. CAMD is
fortunate to have an extremely short injection cycle (on the order of one
minute), so this did not entail too great a hardship for the user community.
After 20 months in limbo, CAMD is about to have a new permanent director. He
is Josef Hormes from Bonn University and we shall all benefit from his
guiding hand. We are all excited about this new development and I
personally hope to be able to get back to a little research. My position
was limited to 100% administration during the interim directorship which
meant no real radiation experiments either. So things did not move forward
very quickly on the Health Physics end. We concentrated on getting
radiation training materials and tests etc. on the web instead. Though
CAMD is responsible for about 1/2 of the badge program at Louisiana State
University (pop. 29,000 students), there is only yours truly to manage all
radiation and general/chemical safety for the CAMD facility. Sorry this
is short but I'd best get back to work. Best to all my friends.