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Become a user

General information

Users are granted beamtime through a peer review proposal process. Beamtime at the ALS is generally granted in multiples of 8-hour shifts. General users are invited to submit requests for beamtime twice a year, usually in December and in June by completing a General User Proposal and Request for Beamtime Form. A successful proposal receives beamtime within a period of 6 months. Thereafter a proposal can be rolled-over up to three times for a total duration of 2 years. Users will receive a notice from the users office that their proposal is up for renewal. Note that although the proposal is not being re-reviewed, a higher cutoff rating of the beamline may result in a loss of beamtime. Please follow the link for more information about becoming an ALS user.

Guidelines for writing a user proposal can be found on the ALS web page. Please contact the beamline scientist or the user's office if you have any questions about the proposal process or need any help with writing the proposal. After your proposal has been reviewed you will receive notification from the user's office how much beamtime you will receive for the next 6-month scheduling period. The beamline scientist will then contact you about your preferred dates and blackout dates and will later broadcast a schedule to all beamline users, attempting as best as possible to accommodate all requests. If circumstances arise that require you to change your schedule, please contact the beamline scientist as soon as possible.

Beamline-specific information for BL 7.3.1 and 11.0.l

Before applying for beamtime please contact the beamline scientist to discuss whether the beamline and endstation are suitable for the planned experiment. It may also be possible to run a brief exploratory experiment on a test sample. While beamtime at the ALS is granted in multiples of 8-hour shifts, beamtime at beamlines 7.3.1 (PEEM-2) and 11.0.1 (PEEM-3 & Dynamics) is scheduled in multiples of 24-hour shifts. In your beamtime request, multiply the number of days the project will need by three and request shifts in 8-hour increments.

Shifts are scheduled in 24-hour blocks, starting in the morning at 8 am. Usually shifts are interleaved day-by-day with those of another user but they can also be scheduled in a long continuous block. Some experiments, in particular those that require sample preparation, may not allow interruption. Please let the beamline scientist know about your preferences.