Consortium for Advanced Radiation Sources

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

The members of the scientific groupings, with the guidance of a Board of Governors, direct the development of the capabilities at three sectors of the Advanced Photon Source (APS). With numerous principal investigators, the Consortium represents one of the largest scientific user groups at the APS. All Consortium facilities at these sectors are made available to the community as national user facilities. Beamtime is allocated through peer review of proposals submitted through the APS online proposal system.

Two main themes are common to experiments in the several disciplines represented in the Consortium:

  • The study of samples with which the x-rays interact very weakly because of, for example, their small size (area or volume), low concentration, large crystallographic unit cell dimensions, or necessity for monochromatic radiation of unusually narrow bandpass
  • The study in a time-dependent manner of samples with which the x-rays interact much more strongly.