This award provides funding for engineering design and construction of synchrotron X-ray beamlines and associated instrumentation that will be part of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) facility at Argonne National Laboratory. This project will be specifically aimed at the design and construction of beamlines for use by the earth sciences community. Projected use of the brilliant and tunable microbeam hard X-radiation at APS include research on materials subjected to ultra-high pressures and temperatures simulating conditions in the interior of the Earth, aerosols, submicroscopic phases in rocks and soils, and kinetic studies of phase transformations important in geological processes.
