About CARS

The Consortium for Advanced Radiation Sources (CARS) is a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary consortium managed by the University of Chicago Center for Advanced Radiation Sources. CARS represents five institutional members and four scientific groupings, each devoted to a particular research area.

CARS has constructed and operates the experimental facilities at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) as National Synchrotron Resources available to the scientific community as National Facilities. Beamtime is allocated through peer review of beamtime proposals to the facilities.

CARS scientific programs were drawn up through detailed discussions with our scientific members and incorporated in proposals and conceptual designs that were peer-reviewed by the APS and outside panels. As a result, three sectors were awarded to CARS, assigned mainly to BioCARS, GeoSoilEnviroCARS and ChemMatCARS. These three sectors and numerous principal investigators make CARS one of the largest scientific user groups at the APS.

The five beamlines on the three CARS sectors are fully operational. The X-rays at the APS are emitted by dipole, wiggler and undulator sources which differ in their spectral distribution, brilliance and intensity. Scientific experiments are designed to exploit the unique features of the X-rays emitted by wiggler and undulator sources.