With the help of a recent $19 million American Recovery and Re-investment Act (ARRA) grant, the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) could become the site of the most advanced x-ray machine in the world.

According to Sol Gruner, physics, Cornell’s synchotron is one of five of its kind in the United States. Gruner is director of the CHESS facility.

“Well, we’d like to build something which basically is more powerful than any of them,” he said.

That’s the goal for the Energy Recovery Linac X-Ray Machine (ERL), which, because of the grant, could have a conceptual design submitted by 2010.

Despite this federal award, there remain obstacles that must be cleared before construction of the ERL can begin.

One of them is the almost half billion-dollar price tag. According to Gruner, the proposal will “go through extensive levels of review by the scientific community” and, if it passes, eventually be debated in Congress as part of the National Science Foundation budget.

Still, Gruner called early responses from the scientific community “very enthusiastic.” If it is accepted, the ERL will take about five years to build.

Not all of the stimulus money is designated for continued development of the ERL, however. Some of it will be used to keep the current projects at Cornell’s Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory up and running. The Wilson Laboratory includes the CHESS facility as well as the Cornell Energy Storage Ring (CESR, pronounced like “Caesar”), which stores beams that have been accelerated by the synchrotron.

CESR serves multiple purposes in the physics research community at Cornell. Until 2008, it was the site of data collection for a high-energy physics experiment that utilized a particle detector called CLEO (short for Cleopatra — named to complement CESR). Soon, Cornell faculty working on this experiment will begin using data from the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

Maury Tigner, director of the Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based Sciences and Education and a prof. emeritus of physics, said he too approved of the continuing research and development funds for the ERL. “It will enable Cornell to continue at the frontier of x-ray science for many years to come,” he said.

Although Tigner said that the stimulus funding “has been very beneficial,” he also looked to the future. “What we need after the stimulus, of course, is sustained support for science and technology development. That’s where the challenge will be,” he said.

Although some current projects at the Cornell synchrotron cannot be revealed yet in order to respect the confidentiality of the researchers, past projects have spanned many disciplines. The classics department has used the facility to examine ancient wood and examine factors such as climate that could have led to the fall of a Minoan civilization on Crete. Ornithologists have used CHESS for analyses of calcium stores in bird bones. Recently, work has been done in high-pressure cryocrystallography, a Cornell-developed technique that examines the effect of freezing and high pressure on protein crystals.

CHESS is also still being employed for x-ray production. The use of x-ray scanning at CHESS recently revealed a “lost” N.C. Wyeth painting underneath the surface of a later work, piquing interest on campus and abroad.

Perhaps the most famous work done at CHESS was by Dr. Roderick Mackinnon, a professor of molecular neurobiology and biophysics at Rockefeller University. Mackinnon’s work at CHESS contributed to a 2003 Nobel Prize in chemistry for examining the structure of the cellular channels through which the body conveys potassium ions.

The NSF finances the synchrotron facilities at Cornell in five-year intervals. In 2008, the previous interval ended along with the high-energy physics experiment. Because of this, the funding division of the NSF has had to adapt to meet the changing needs of the facilities. The $19 million grant will allow activities to continue for this year, although no official approval has been given for the period ending in 2014.

“That has not yet formally been decided,” Gruner said. “But I’m quite optimistic.”