New Argonne head is chosen

Eric Isaacs becomes director of Argonne National Laboratory this month, where he expects to refocus the lab on its core strengths in x rays, high-performance computing, materials, chemistry, and energy. Isaacs went to Argonne in 2003 to head the Center for Nanoscale Materials, one of five nanotechnology user facilities located at US Department of Energy labs. He will retain his appointment as a professor of physics at the University of Chicago, which has managed ANL for the DOE and its predecessors since the lab’s inception during World War II.

Prior to Argonne, Isaacs spent 15 years at Bell Labs, first as a postdoc, eventually as director of the materials physics research department, and later head of the semiconductor physics department. Isaacs sees the national labs as heirs to Bell Labs’ former role as an innovation hub: Both places hired the best scientists and engineers, and both invested in high-risk basic research. What sets the national labs and, historically, Bell Labs apart from research universities, Isaacs says, is their focus on research to meet missions.

Isaacs says he is grateful for the $13 million in stimulus funding that the lab is receiving for infrastructure upgrades, although it is the lowest amount going to any of DOE’s civilian multi-program labs. “We’re in between projects,” he explains, noting that the recipients of more funding have major facilities or upgrades under way. Last year ANL lost the competition to host DOE’s $550 million Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (see Physics Today, February 2009, page 25 ). But Isaacs vows to do what it takes to keep the lab’s Advanced Photon Source at the head of the pack of US synchrotrons that produce hard x rays. A proposed revitalization of the APS, he says, could provide the capability to produce x-ray pulses as short as 1 picosecond, which would give researchers the ability to take snapshots of rapid processes as they occur.