Greetings from CAMD

The J. Bennett Johnston Sr. Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices [CAMD] at Louisiana State University is currently in a shutdown.  We have contractors from the Budker Physics Institute from Novosibirsk re-installing our 7.5 super-conducting wiggler with cryostat attached.  Our 4 wiggler beamlines have been waiting some 6 months for the arrival of this re-furbished equipment which will permit us to re-condense any helium and significantly reduce both our use and cost of helium [green engineering].  This is extremely important as helium usage was costing 3% of our total budget.  As it was, on July 1^st, we lost 30% of our total budget and almost a quarter of our faculty and staff.  Getting the wiggler up and running will definitely act as a morale booster.  We have also secured funding for a 27 pole VUV undulator which should be installed next year.  CAMD has a niche in the VUV spectroscopy region, which is heavily over-subscribed.  LSU was awarded one of the DOE Energy Frontier Research Centers and CAMD acts as the sub-atomic catalysis site for the center.

Shortly, we will also install another 3M TGM beamline [on loan from Bonn University] that should help to relieve some of the pressure on the other 3M TGM currently in use.  This first beamline produces about 22 top peer-reviewed papers per year, among them Phys. Reviews and JACS.  With our modest budget and staff, we support almost 300 on-site users, some 81 faculty from LSU alone and we continue to accept outside samples for PX and Microfabrication work. Still, in these uncertain times, we are mindful that each staff member lost puts pressure on our “Critical Mass” and our ability to keep things running smoothly.  Key personnel are already looking elsewhere, as the university has not signaled much support for a synchrotron ring as part of the university’s infrastructure. In the past year, the university has replaced its President, Chancellor and Provost.  There is no institutional memory any longer and that is a potentially difficult state.

The state of Louisiana has constitutionally protected everything in its budgets except health and human resources and higher education.  Perhaps, I’m biased but I think they may have it backwards.  It is difficult to comprehend these unfortunate cuts as Baton Rouge currently has the 6^th strongest economy in the nation.  Wishing you all nothing more than minimal budget cuts and the ability to move forward with accelerator-based science.



Sincerely



Lorraine