UC Davis faculty members may not know it, but they can have free access to the Advanced Light Source, a national user facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that generates intense light for scientific research. The machine, built in 1993 in the hills above UC Berkeley, has 20 beamlines. The central feature of the machine is an electron sychrotron, a machine that accelerates electrons around a circular path to energies of 1.5 billion electron volts -- close to the 186,282 miles-per-second speed of light. After light is extracted from the machine's bend magnets or "insertion devices," it is sent through beamline monochromators, branched off and directed into experimental stations by means of special mirrors and optical devices. A new beamline that provides circularly polarized soft X-rays has just opened. Applied science professor Stephen Cramer and physics professor Chuck Fadley share about a third of this resource, but capacity remains for other UC Davis experiments. "Anyone on campus interested in materials science or metals in biology might benefit from using the beamline," Cramer says. He is working with a few graduate students and postdocs on a study that looks at proteins that contain metal ions used to make certain chemical reactions go faster. "The beamline is important so we can see how the metal centers absorb X-rays -- the research requires a bright, intense X-ray beam," Cramer says. He notes that the Advanced Light Source also has excellent facilities for protein crystallography and X-ray microscopy. To learn more, contact Cramer at spcramer@ucdavis.edu or Fadley at fadley@physics.ucdavis.edu.