Don’t Upgrade the ALS, Build a New Synchrotron in Florida Instead
The next American light source shouldn’t be an upgrade, it should be a clean start. Upgrades preserve jobs, history, and infrastructure, but they also preserve outdated beamlines, allocation models, and science priorities. The most strategically useful thing a synchrotron can do now is high-throughput tomography. Imaging that serves large scales and small materials, batteries, chips, integrated circuits, critical minerals, and radiation environments found in space. Imaging that doesn’t need a hero PI (sorry readers I know thats probably you) to get funded, one that supports real products and their timelines.
Florida is the right location in my opinion. It sits inside a growing aerospace and materials corridor. SpaceX, Blue Origin, defense contractors, battery startups, chip fabs … all of them need CT infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet. They need repeatable, reliable and predictable access not shifts built on grants and distributed by ancient beaurcracy. User support as part of the product, not as a favor. It should not be another national facility trying to serve everyone equally. It should serve the problems that are immediate. Built for industry workflows, scheduled and integrated. Contracts. Pay-per-sample. Ubiquitous formats, queueable, reconstructable, programmable. All the things that synchrotron are currently not. Leave exploration to the other synchrotrons. And demand for this already exists with companies like Lumafield, Sigray, Zeiss, Glimpse that are scaling the mid-tier while currently the high end still belongs to the synchrotrons. Give them each a corner of the ring and let them duke it out, let them buy and sell ports on the open market.
Upgrades won’t get us there. Everyone that works at a national lab with a synchrtron knows how deep the ruts in the road already are. $1B modernization of the shell still leaves the incentives in place: the beamlines get better but serve the same legacy. The pandemic helped prove what science can do when its sigularly focused. If national competitiveness is a real priority, this is where it starts. Synchrotrons turn inspection into insight and validate materials, confirm assemblies, raise the floor for every sector that builds anything. Let ALS and SSRL age out, or continue with what they do best. Let Florida build the machine we actually need, the one that NSLS II and APS-U really don’t want to do … the yucky business stuff.
AlphaFold Didn’t Kill MX but 4th-Gen Synchrotrons Will
Every time a synchrotron moves from 3rd to 4th gen, the number of relevant MX beamlines users drops, the whole thing is on life support.
MX beamline were not out done by AlphaFold because they still had inertia. But the real killer will not come from AI, it comes from the ring upgrades. When a synchrotron shuts down for an upgrade, people say one year but it’s actually about two. In that time, MX users disappear, they ship crystals somewhere else and figure out how to work remotely. When the light comes back on, many never return. What replaces them isn’t a new generation. It is no generation.
In the U.S, the human capital for MX is drying up, there’s no cohort of 25-year-olds begging for 2 a.m. beamtime slots. The few that remain drift into analysis, modeling, or commercial R&D. MX in America is mostly carried by an older generation with habits that predate modern detectors. How many of the old guard still collect data at 1 degree per sec? At 4th gen synchrotron thats like asking a supersonic jet to taxi across the Atlantic. And yet the beamlines keep getting better: I bet the last horse-drawn carriage was a real beauty too.
So what is MX now? It’s confirmation. Fold-checking. We helped build AlphaFold’s training data (it seems so unfair) Room temperature dynamic, that’s real, that could carry forward. But it’s not what most beamlines are set up to do, and the US community that might do it isn’t really there yet.
Fragment screening is the diamond in the experiment rough, pharma wants answers. XChem thrives, creating the training data that will be its demise as well. But another wave is coming for them too. Faster tools, better proxies, AI-led design. When that hits, “screening” will need a new defense, confirmation machines like the rest of MX probably
The 4th generation of beamlines will still be here. The question is which science deserves the space, and should it be MX.
Where Is the Synchrotron Community Online
For a group of facilities that sit at the center of modern scientific progress, synchrotrons have a surprisingly quiet online presence. At least, that is how it looks from the outside and, more crucially, from the inside too. I sometimes wonder if I am simply missing the places where people gather, or if the community has grown up without a shared public space at all. It feels unusual compared to almost any other part of my life: cycling, baking, surfing, rockets. We are catered to and we contribute to all of these online. We are entertained and educated, amused, outrage baited, and given endless “news” articles that we happily consume. Many scientific fields have a natural home on the internet. Synchrotrons seem invisible to newcomers and to people working across the broader ecosystem. Small pockets exist, working groups, collaborators, Slack channels, but nothing that feels like the whole picture.
There are a few structures that give the impression of community, although none of them feel like the real thing. Lightsources.org is a good example. It is one of the most complete sources of announcements and stories, but it functions more like a broadcast channel than a gathering place. Conferences bring people together, although they are usually organised around techniques or specific research areas rather than the wider synchrotron world. Where is the beamline scientist conference where we celebrate how to best herd cats? Email lists and facility blasts work well for people already inside the network, but they reach only the people who already know to subscribe. Are we still reading emails? I keep asking myself if there is a public forum for beamline scientists, data engineers, roboticists, users, students and industry partners to contribute and consume. If it exists, I have not found it yet. If it does not, why not.
This leaves a strange gap. I want an MKBHD of new beamline equipment, I want r/synchrotrons to be a place I go to, I want memes. One of the most collaborative infrastructures in science has no obvious online gathering point, talking head or news outlet for the people who make it work. Ideas spread slowly and each facility grows its own conventions (even between beamlines at the same facility). I am curious if others see the same thing. Is there a community space I have missed? Does a global conversation already happen somewhere that newer scientists cannot see. Or is this simply a field that has not yet built its own public commons. If you know the answer or have ideas, it would be good to understand what exists and what is still missing.
Engines of National Competitiveness
Synchrotrons have become one of the most quietly influential technologies in modern science. In the last 40 years they shifted from specialised physics machines into the backbone of entire sectors driving the modern economy, such as energy storage, aerospace, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and cultural heritage. Not to mention our understanding of biology. Any field that depends on structure, reliability and real scientific understanding eventually finds its way to a synchrotron. This transformation happened gradually, infecting universities and companies as facilities around the world turned brilliant light into industrial insight.
The turning point was the operational discipline and scientific method writ large. Beamlines learned to run like production environments with workflows that emphasised predictability, clarity and repeatability. Automated sample changers, real time reconstruction pipelines and stable software practices became the norm and reomote automation exploded during the covid era. Experienced staff became engines of throughput. What used to be episodic experiments became routine and schedulable processes. Behind the scenes that shift created the scale that companies and industries can build strategies on.
Very few people outside the community talk about what this means for national competitiveness. Synchrotrons provide a place where ideas can be validated, generate high quality data and raise the floor for whole communities. Nations invest in factories and innovation hubs and synchrotrons function as both. If we want a clear picture of the future of competitiveness, it might be time to alert the public that these facilities are strategic assets and they have been quietly shaping the landscape for decades. With that in mind: where is the synchrotron online community and our voice in the deafening onslaught of online science educators?
Focus of the New Florida Synchrotron, A Source For Industries
If Florida builds its new synchrotron (The Beach), it shouldn’t try to copy the existing playbook. The real opportunity is in commercial tomography: high-throughput 3D imaging that industries already need, but can’t access at scale. Every modern ring can do great science; very few have figured out how to turn their tomography beamlines into genuine engines for economic output. The Beach (Brightest Ever ACHromat) synchrotron can skip the slow part and build directly for commercial value, predictable throughput, pay-to-play automated workflows, and industry-ready products.
Right now, battery companies, aerospace groups, chip fabs and materials labs are all bottlenecked by CT capacity. Florida has a future untapped space industry that will need tomography and radiation-tested equipment. Industrial CT scanners can’t match the speed or resolution of a synchrotron and definitely not a one geared for the needs of the community with whole sectors dedicated to different Tomography regimes (macro, micro, nano, 3D, 4D, time-resolved and laminography). But almost no facility offers an access model designed for industry. Beamtime allocation is still structured for fairness, not throughput or return on investment (ROI). That’s the gap: if The Beach positions tomography as a service, with automated real-time reconstruction, it a public-private partnership win-win.
A new ring in Florida’s tech corridor has many strategic advantages, the greatest of which is that it isn’t burdened by legacy. It can build an allocation system aligned with product development, not just paper proposals. It can integrate robotics, AI reconstruction, and industrial data formats from day one. And it can court the growing wave of commercial tomography companies (Lumafield, Sigray, Glimpse, Zeiss Xradia) looking for partnerships. If Florida wants a synchrotron that actually drives regional innovation, tomography is the clearest, most investable way to get there a bridge between science and a source for industries that need it. The Beach should be built for the next 50 years of industry, not the last 50 years of academia.
Serial Crystallography Is More Scientific
Many good careers have been dashed against the rocks by chance, and a fair few have been made by luck alone. The real shift underway is toward systems that generate the same answer every time. Time-resolved and serial crystallography are shaping expectations in X-ray science because it forces this consistency. As experiments become faster, more automated, and eventually more driven by AI and robot sample exchangers performing the same motions thousands of times, reproducibility stops being a scientific value and becomes a product discipline. The product is a high quality, room tempreature low-dose structures, a little snapshot of time. The precision needed for that outcome pushes every part of the workflow to behave predictably from loading to alignment to analysis. It makes the field a preview of things to come. The days of one heroic crystal making or breaking a graduate student should be behind us, replaced by systems that are reliable, repeatable and fair.
Ayo Deathstar
For serial crystrallography experiments we always pick a theme and go in strict alphabetical order, and it makes the whole process both cleaner and more fun. Each chip gets one of these names (Anakin, Battlestar, Chewie or Ayo, Bet, Chopped), and it works as a reference point, a kind of mental anchor, for objects that are otherwise visually identical. The long-range order of the alphabet lets us perceive the experiment moving forward in real time, and it gives future-us an immediate sense of the exact sequence the chips followed on the day.
But no diagram teaches you more about HPC pipelines than working at the beamline and actually needing one. An experiment only works when everything works in concert, and that goes from nodes handing off tasks cleanly to robots, motors and detectors doing the same.
Speed is irrelevant if the system is messy and mysterious. Clean naming and decision points matter. Clarity matters as much as anything and predictability is priceless. Beamline experiments tend to succeed through clear coordination, adaptability and steady operational discipline, and that same mindset is what will make distributed HPC pipelines work in practice.
Data-responsive Labs (AI)
We might already have a working version of “AI-driven research” inside beamlines, in the form of fully data-responsive labs.
At synchrotrons, beamline automation has quietly become a real-world model of data-driven discovery. Robots, detectors, and analysis software already operate within a closed feedback loop. A robotic arm mounts a sample, data are collected and analyzed in real time, and the system, currently guided by a person, determines the next action. It is not just automation for efficiency; it is automation for decision-making.
That loop (data → robot → experiment → analysis → data) runs as long as there is light, hundreds of times a day, at hundreds of beamlines at tens of facilities around the world. In effect, beamlines are living examples of how feedback becomes action, with humans guiding rather than blocking the flow. What many AI and automation projects are still trying to build from scratch, beamlines have been refining for years.
If the broader R&D community wants to understand what genuine programmatic discovery looks like, it might be worth studying how beamlines already function. They bridge research and implementation in a way that is both practical and scalable.
It feels like an idea worth developing, especially at the intersection of automation and scientific decision-making.
