Dream Beam

DOE x‐ray light sources facilities such as the Advanced Photon Source, the LINAC Coherent Light Source and the Advanced Light Source are undergoing major upgrades to increase the source brightness and enable groundbreaking science, based on laser‐like high coherent flux. The Diffraction‐limited Radiation Enhancement with Adaptive Mirrors (DREAM) project takes advantage of recent technological developments in the field of x‐ray adaptive optics to shape and control coherent x‐ray wavefronts at the nanometer level, tuning their properties in novel ways. 

This work will develop automated beamline alignment procedures using adaptive optics to achieve optimal performance during routine user operation, using machine learning procedures. It will also seek the tighter integration of beamlines with their experimental endstations, demonstrating dynamic x‐ray sample illumination for high‐throughput data collection and autonomous experiments. The project will explore the use of adaptive optics to engineer wavefronts to give rise to new contrast mechanisms and higher sensitivity in experiments, tuning the phase of the light when it interacts with the sample. 

The DREAM beam project represents a critical, collaborative step forward toward enabling high‐speed experiments for in‐operando studies of new micro‐electronics, quantum devices, or batteries.


This is a project over five years, with the following goals:

Interested in collaborating or joining the team? Feel free to reach out!

Latest updates

Experiments at University of Iowa on Thin Adaptive Optics (July 2024)

We had a a great time conducting experiments at the University of Iowa blending technological developments from DOE and NASA, to the benefit of 4th generation synchrotron light sources in collaboration with Penn State University (Dr. Pannawit Tipsawat and Prof. Susan Trolier-McKinstry) and University of Iowa (Prof. Casey deRoo, Kenney Buffo and Philip Griffin)

Xiaoya Chong, Kenny Buffo, Antoine Islegen-Wojdyla at the University of Iowa in July 2024 (not pictured: Philip Griffin and Casey deRoo)

Seij DeLeon, Fanny Rodolakis, Antoine Islegen-Wojdyla and Xiaoya Chong at ALS beamline 5.3.1 in July 2024

Dr. Fanny Rodolakis from the Advanced Photon Source Visits the Dream Team (July 2024)

Dr. Fanny Rodolakis, who work in the beamline controls team at the Advanced Light Source, joined the Dream Team for automated beamline alignment experiments, and help us develop a graphical user interface for beamline alignment based on the EPICS/bluesky/react stack, as a joint collaboration between the Advanced Light Source, the Advanced Photon Source and the National Synchrotron Light Source (Dr. Max Rakitin, lead of Data Acquisition & Detectors Group)

"Francis" Wei He will join the Dream Team as an ALS doctoral fellow in September 2024

"Francis" Wei He is  graduate student from the X-ray Laboratory for Research on Quantum Materials (X-Lab) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he works under the supervision of Dr. Alex Frañó, and her will join the Dream Team in September as an ALS doctoral fellow, and he will work on My research will focus on dual-beam zone plates (DBZs) in order to find new ways of interpreting light-matter interaction leveraging coherence with quantum materials.

Chaoying Gu's paper on EUV Fourier ptychography is out! (June 2024)

Dream team member Chaoying Gu presented her work on Full Field-of-View Fourier Ptychography for Extreme Ultraviolet Microscope at the 2024 IEEE Conference on Computational Imaging Using Synthetic Apertures. Her work focuses on the use of Fourier ptychography, a computational imaging technique based on coherent imaging that allows to improve the resolution beyond the diffraction-limit and correct for aberrations, applied to EUV photolithography masks that are used to make the latest generation of AI microchips.

Towards Full Field-of-View Fourier Ptychography for Extreme Ultraviolet Microscope
C Gu, A Islegen-Wojdyla, M Benk; KA Goldberg; L Waller, IEEE CISA 2024 doi.org/10.1109/CISA60639.2024.10576262

Antoine changes his name! (May 2024)

Dream beam principal investigator Antoine Wojdyla gets married and adds the name of his partner to his. He is now known as Antoine Islegen-Wojdyla (Ahn-twahn Ish-leh-ghen Voy-dih-lah – yes, try one more time)

Dr. Antoine Wojdyla presents at the Department of Energy Principal Investigators’ Meeting on Accelerator and Detector Research (April 2024)

Dr. Antoine Wojdyla participated in the DOE ADR PI meeting, where researchers from the DOE complex presented their latest results. Lots of exciting research going on!

Preprint on automated beamline alignment with machine learning is out! (March 2024)

Tom Morris published a preprint of the paper on automated alignment, where we use a flavor of machine learning called bayesian optimization to automatically align the beam based on sparse observation.  This work is based on the blop software(https://nsls-ii.github.io/blop/) that is built on the bluesky data collection framework, so that it can be deployed on any beamline effortlessly.

A General Bayesian Algorithm for the Autonomous Alignment of Beamlines
T. W. Morris, M. Rakitin, A. Islegen-Wojdyla, Y. Du, M. Fedurin, A. C. Giles, D. Leshchev, W. H. Li, P. Moeller, B. Nash, B. Romasky, E. Stavitski, A. L. Walter arxiv.org/abs/2402.16716

Xiaoya Chong (November 2023) joins the Dream Team


We are pleased to welcome Dr. Xiaoya Chong in the ALS Dream Team. Dr. Chong joins the team as a postdoctoral fellow and she will work on machine learning techniques for automated alignment of soft x-ray beamlines, in collaboration with the ALS Computing team (Alex Hexemer and Tanny Chavez) and the MLExchange Project. She recently earned her PhD from the Department of Computer Science at the City University of Hong Kong.

Xiaoya Chong,
new ALS Dream Team member!

Dream Team intern Bryan Ochoa (August 2023)

Bryan Ochoa wins best poster from Berkeley Lab summer intern competition 

 

Bryan Ochoa, who worked on the Characterization of Piezoelectric Device for X-ray Adaptive Optics Applications, won the first place in the Berkeley Lab summer intern poster competition – Congratulations Bryan!


We demonstrated that the piezoelectric device worked, and characterized some of its properties (sensitivity and frequency response.) We successfully deployed a new instrument controls framework (EPICS) that will allow performing measurement campaigns and help develop new piezoelectric device specifically designed for X-ray applications.

Automated alignment experiments at the Advanced Light Source

We performed automated alignment experiments at ALS beamline 5.3.1 in collaboration with Tom Morris from NSLS-II and Boaz Nash from Radiasoft, based on blop-tools based on gaussian processed. 

We were able to successfully optimize the size of the x-ray beam and reach the optimal beam size, despite the many coupled degrees of freedom and the presence of many apertures in the beamline. This work paves the way for further developpments including wavefront sensor and adaptive optics.

Tanny Chavez, Grace Luo, Tom Morris, Boaz Nash and Antoine Wojdyla at ALS Beamline 5.3.1 

Teachers and studencts from Beamline and Optical Modelling School (BLOMS 2023) at Berkeley Lab, in Berkeley, CA –May 2023.

Successful Beamline and Optical Modelling School!

We co-organized (Antoine Wojdyla. Ken Golderg, Andrea Taylor) the Beamline and Optical Modelling School, May 30–June 1, 2023 in Berkeley California.

We taught the basics of beamline design and simulation, with tools such as Shadow, xoppy, Oasys, SRW and sirepo.,We had over 70 participants from many countries, half in person and half remote, due to limited capacity. 

website: go.lbl.gov/bloms2023

A full summary of the event:
Beamline Optics and Modeling School (BLOMS) 2023 –ALS news

Wavefront sensing and adaptive optics experiment at the Advanced Photon Source


We travelled to the Advanced Photon Source to perform experimental validation of the ALS-U reflective wavefront sensor at higher energy (above 8 keV), and demonstrated that it worked over a wide range of photon energy, while benchmarking the results with the coded mask technique developped by our collaborators.

Xianbo Shi, Antoine Wojdyla, Matt Frith, Ken Goldberg, Matt Highland and Diane Bryant at APS ID-28 "IDEA" beamline (April 2023)