Environmental Sciences

1. Environmental Sciences • What are the key scientific drivers? What experiments will NSLS-II enable that are not presently possible? • Broad scientific specialties related to contaminant transport in nature, how contaminants are bound and interact with mineral surfaces, organic materials, organisms, fluids, chemical species. Improvements in spatial resolution are critical for examining these processes due to the natural spatial heterogeneity of natural materials, improvements in flux are critical both to extend the MDL of experiments and for evaluating reaction kinetics. • What technical capabilities will these require? (Beamlines, endstations, undulators…) • Current community is technically broad. Virtually all MES PI’s use multiple techniques, at the NSLS dominated by hard x-ray microprobe, EXAFS, STXM, FTIR, and XRD. Future potential in tender x-ray XAS and total x-ray scattering and pdf. Reality that the two most heavily used techniques, are heavily oversubscibed at the NSLS. Planned nanoprobe, exafs, diffraction, and scattering beamlines will be useful to the community, but we’d forsee the the NSLS’s current HXRM could be moved to NSLS-II with immediate gains in intensity as well as for example moving quick exafs beamlines to TPW. Real opportunities in new XAS techniques on soft bends extending down to lower energy (i.e. S species). • Estimate of community size. • Difficult to quantify. It’s clear that at the NSLS the community has consistently grown, even at more rapid rates over the last few years and there is general sense is even current available beamtime is insufficient. • What detector requirements does this field have? Do these require R+D? • Many experiments today are detector limited. EXAFS and microprobe have similar issues that could be addressed by improved multielement solid state detectors with improved amplifiers. • What software and computing infrastructure requirements are there? (Control, data acquisition, analysis) • Any particular accelerator requirements? • Beam stability will be key as we move to extending the spectroscopic potential of microfocusing. Redox sensitive samples! • Any particular conventional facility requirements? • Laboratory requirements for environmental sciences would benefit from laboratories really optimized for environmental samples. In particular for actinide work. Recommendation that doe give some consideration to its rules for work on radioactive materials (which are inconvenient and not necessarily in a sensible or logical way) • NSLS2 should carefully consider Proposal review.