Welcome to the Pacific Northwest Consortium Collaborative Access Team!

The PNC-CAT was founded in 1990 as a collaboration between Pacific Northwest American and Western Canadian institutions to design, construct and operate undulator and bending magnet beamlines at sector 20 of the Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory. The principal collaborative partners in this endeavor were the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington State, Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia and The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington.

Our beamlines were designed primarily for energy variable applications of focused and unfocused X-rays in the energy range 2.5 - 40 keV in the fields of Physics, Chemistry and Materials as well as Environmental and Geological Sciences. Our capabilities in these areas are further described in the Beamlines and Research portions of this website. New developments and improvements to our facility are always in mind, and suggestions or questions welcome.

We have been operational and accepting General Users since 2001. Since 2003, with changes in operations funding by the Department of Energy, we are now partnered with X-ray Operations and Research, under the auspices of the X-ray Science Division of the Advanced Photon Source, but our primary goal remains unchanged: to provide a world-class facility for scientists to conduct their X-ray research. Should you wish to conduct experiments at the PNC-CAT, I encourage you to apply for beamtime. If you have questions about your experiments at PNC, our staff scientists are always interested in novel research challenges and are quite willing to assist new CAT or General Users.

Again, welcome to the PNC-CAT and I hope your time here is as productive as we can make it!

Best regards,

Edward A. Stern,

Director, PNC-CAT