>> Since 1995 Argonne National Laboratory located just southwest of Chicago has been at the forefront of atomic scale research in the United States at the heart of that research is the advanced photon source or APS a huge particle accelerator that generates super bright x-rays by accelerating electrons to near light speed in a circular storage ring.

Those X-rays controlled by powerful magnets are then diverted to more than 70 separate being lines, which have been used to probe all manner of things from the structure of the COVID virus to microscopic defects in a jet engine turbine blade.

2 new battery designs.

But after nearly 3 decades and thousands of experiments, the APS was beginning to show its age.

And in April 2023, it went offline to allow for an 815 million Dollar Department of Energy funded upgrade Chicago.

Tonight.

Producer Paul came has the story.

>> We started planning for over 10 years ago.

>> only people's Evans, who we first met in 2023. is responsible for choreographing the complex, logistical engineering and technical dance required to complete the project.

>> The upgrade came about as a way to take the existing APS facility to the next level we wanted by machine.

They wanted to do different techniques and enhance the capabilities that we had here.

And so that we compete on a worldwide stage.

We want to keep APS as a world leading machine.

>> As the new bride to lines come online already.

Scientists of benefiting from the improvements that have been made.

Chevy Kelly lead suspect Rusty crews at all gone.

>> The old theme was typically about a millimeter high, but maybe 10 millimeters wide.

So now we've taken all of those X-rays that we had before and squeeze them into one millimeter by one Millimeter Square area.

So in that one moment by 1 million, we have like 500 times the brightness that we had before.

>> That great.

A brightness allows scientists from the Midwest and across the globe to study materials with much high precision and it much faster speeds.

We have the most brilliant X-rays in the world.

>> Especially in the high energy X-ray regime.

So if people need to push the limits of time and space, which many want to they need to come here because this is the only place where they can do certain amount of research.

The biggest change is in how orders of magnitude of skate intimate who can access.

>> And so you can follow the changes in the material right from the addict on skin all the way up to the microscope you can do this in what we call a multi-modal fashion, which means you can study different aspects of the mature the same time.

So it's a difference between watching a movie in black and white and Washington >> And each year more than 5,000 research is used APS to advance knowledge in all fields of science at the nanoscale.

>> We have people doing a lot of chemistry looking at new batteries.

We have a lot of users and the biological field.

So they're looking at proteins and new drugs for drug discovery.

>> And we have people looking in material, science and engineering and they come in with a lot of energy and interesting problems.

And from the different scientific domains.

>> But what gone special on not just the tools that are available to scientists.

>> I would say the number one thing that makes this facility special is the staff that work here.

And their ability to get right in with the scientists that come here from all over the world measurements.

And so we learn about the problems that they're trying to stall and then we help them design their experiments here to get the most out of their data.

>> The upgrade also includes the construction of additional long being lines.

This I believe is the largest enclosure in the world for extreme measurements like this, the whole room is lead line.

So this is a very big construction project that was done about 2 years ago.

And so basically we built the house earlier.

Now we're putting in the furniture.

>> For allowing atomic-scale analysis with the real world applications so we can take our x-ray beams and we can bring them down in this beam.

One to about one Micron.

>> That's 100th of a human here.

Very small.

Right now.

We're looking at a turbine blade.

This is titanium way that could be used in jet engines, research, scientists and engineers.

>> Are interested in looking at the mechanical properties of these materials as you fly.

You have stresses and temperatures that these things are subjected to.

So almost all materials are made of multiple grains.

Crystallographic grains, like all metals and ceramics.

And what this allows you to do.

It's green by green.

See how the stresses develop.

See how they're related.

See how cracks form.

>> The fascinating thing about materials is that the concerted motion of a few 100 happens or so can eventually lead to materials.

Figure.

So if you have start moving together, they form what's called a dislocation.

These dislocations bind up the cause of stress buildup in the material leads to formation for crack grows and then a bridge collapses are not engine fails.

>> Because the upgraded APS can see and so much greater detail.

That also means far more data to analyze, come researches youth, Aurora, one of the world's fastest supercomputers capable of 2 billion 1 1 billion calculations per second along with artificial intelligence to focus and refine their inquiries.

>> We have a pipe essentially that come next.

The instruments at the APS to computing resources.

We produce a lot of data.

Hundreds of petabytes say put that in perspective, that's 10's of DVD's full of data every minute.

And hidden in the data is insight into the problems trying to we could end up at the state up, but it would take become PETA crunching the numbers for a long period of time.

that to hit will do this in near real time.

And so providing feedback to the scientists and to take experiment, stop experiment pause Sunday, in a bin in more detail and so on.

I lettuces parcel of that data very quickly and find these because estimate of failure helps understand why these materials fail help of design at the materials.

We haven't even started scratching the surface of how high and computing is going to help us lot capabilities from our facility.

>> People's Evans says the project is about 98% done and hopes to complete the final elements of the great by the end of September.

>> Working on a PSU has been challenging and I think it's been probably the most thrilling thing done over my career.

been there downs, but I don't think there's much that I would change how it all came together.

>> For Chicago tonight on poll