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Argonne showcases upgraded X-ray source, supercomputing and nanoscale facilities funded by the DOE
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Summary
Argonne researchers described how three of the laboratory's DOE-funded user facilities—the Center for Nanoscale Materials, the Advanced Photon Source and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility—work together to accelerate materials, battery and biological research and to enable early-stage digital-twin and quantum projects.
Argonne National Laboratory researchers on stage at an OutLoud public lecture described how the laboratory's user facilities provide open access to specialized instruments, data and staff expertise that accelerate scientific discovery.
"User facilities provide access to specialized instruments, tools, data, and staff expertise," said Sean Jones, Argonne's deputy laboratory director for science and technology, as he introduced the evening's presentations.
The presenters walked the audience through three core facilities. Connie Pfeiffer, user program manager at the Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM), said the CNM hosted more than 1,000 users last fiscal year, with roughly 30% of users coming from Argonne itself and access to about 160 tools for synthesis, characterization, fabrication and computation. "We have synthesis tools... characterization tools...fabrication tools...and then theory and data," Pfeiffer said, summarizing the facility's four capability areas.
At the Advanced Photon Source (APS), Stefan, associate division director for X-ray science, described the facility's roughly 72 beamlines and thousands of users annually and credited a recent, multi-year storage-ring upgrade that dramatically increased the source's brightness. He said that upgrade was funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) and presented it as a major infrastructure investment that expands what scientists can measure with X rays. "That factor of 500,000,000,000 allows you to do things that you just cannot do in any other way," Stefan said of the increase in brightness.
Catherine Riley, director of science at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), described Aurora, the ALCF's large AI-enabled supercomputer made up of over 10,000 nodes, and explained how leadership computing time is competitively allocated to open scientific research. "These systems are incredibly flexible scientific instruments," Riley said, noting applications ranging from battery materials and aircraft design to efforts to build data-driven models of the brain.
The presenters emphasized cross-facility workflows: CNM and APS produce experimental data and images that ALCF computation can ingest to build simulations or "digital twins," enabling researchers to rehearse experiments and optimize limited onsite time. Pfeiffer pointed to Polybot, an autonomous discovery laboratory pairing robotics and AI to accelerate experimental throughput, as an example of how automation and facility integration can speed discovery.
The speakers repeatedly credited DOE support for the user facilities and for recent upgrades. They also highlighted real-world outcomes: high-resolution structure determinations used in drug research and industry collaborations on battery and materials challenges.
The session closed with audience questions on AI adoption, validation of AI outputs and outreach programs. Connie Pfeiffer highlighted an exemplary student research program that brings local high school students into the lab to design and run experiments.
The lecture is archived on Argonne's YouTube channel and the laboratory plans an open house on June 27 tied to its 80th anniversary.
