LSU Awarded $20 Million NSF Mid-scale Grant to Build LaNeXT, a One-of-a-Kind Ultrafast X-ray Facility

LSU has received a $20 million Mid-scale Research Infrastructure (MRI) award from the National Science Foundation to build LaNeXT, a laser-driven X-ray facility that will allow researchers to watch some of nature's fastest processes as they happen.

The Laboratory for Next-Generation X-ray Science and Technology, or LaNeXT, will give researchers the ability to capture motion at the atomic and molecular level in billionths and quadrillionths of a second. The facility will help scientists answer questions that are currently out of reach: How do molecules rearrange during chemical reactions? How do materials respond to stress, heat, or light? How do biological molecules change shape as they carry out the processes of life?

"The research advances LSU will be able to achieve with these new capabilities puts our researchers, students and partners at the forefront of materials and particle science," Chancellor Jim Dalton said. "LaNeXT enables LSU to close a critical research gap-the ability to see molecules in motion-positioning our teams as key collaborators on research with national labs and university peers such as Stanford, Berkeley and MIT, placing us alongside prestigious top 50 research institutions."

Once complete, LaNeXT will generate X-ray pulses as short as 30 femtoseconds. One femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second. In that amount of time, light travels only about the width of a small bacterium. For scientists, this kind of speed is essential yet rare. Many chemical, biological and materials processes happen so quickly that today's instruments often capture only the "before" and "after," leaving the most important steps invisible.

"One of the biggest challenges in modern science is that the most important changes often happen too fast to see directly," said Gerald Schneider, chemistry professor and leader of the College of Science-led LaNeXT team at LSU. "For a long time, scientists have had to infer what happens in the middle of a reaction by looking at the starting point and the final result. LaNeXT will let us watch those hidden steps unfold. That means we can ask questions-and solve problems-that were previously beyond reach."

Schneider compares the challenge to the wagon-wheel illusion in old Western movies, where a wheel appears to spin backward because the camera isn't recording fast enough.

"The motion is real, but what we see depends on how fast we take the pictures," Schneider said. "If our scientific camera is too slow, we can misunderstand what is actually happening. LaNeXT gives us a much faster camera for the molecular world."

Filling a National Capability Gap

The United States operates four synchrotron user facilities-the "big four"-under the Department of Energy: the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at LSU's national lab partner Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, also in California and adjacent to the nation's only hard X-ray free-electron laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), recently upgraded to LCLS-II at a cost of more than $1 billion. LCLS-II can now fire up to a million pulses per second, but beamtime can be difficult to secure, and the facility is optimized for the fastest, brightest experiments at the attosecond frontier.

While workhorses of materials characterization, existing synchrotrons cannot capture changes at timescales shorter than a hundred picoseconds. This leaves an experimental no-man's-land of roughly three orders of magnitude-the femtosecond to nanosecond range-where many of the most important problems in chemistry, electrochemistry and structural biology remain unsolved. LaNeXT will bridge this gap.

LaNeXT will be built in partnership with UT Austin, which pioneered the compact laser-plasma accelerator approach that drives LaNeXT. The LSU facility will also include gamma-ray imaging with spatial resolution improved by factors of 10 to 100. LaNeXT's high-harmonic-generation endstation will be built in collaboration with Stephen Leone, professor of physics and chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.

Combined Capabilities Found Nowhere Else

LaNeXT's location at LSU, alongside the existing Louisiana Light Source synchrotron and LSU's nanofabrication capabilities, will make it possible to combine three powerful tools in one place: ultrafast laser-based X-rays, synchrotron X-rays and advanced sample fabrication.

Among the first experiments, researchers will expose semiconductor samples to the intense synchrotron beam and use LaNeXT's ultrafast laser-based X-rays to measure the resulting changes in the material. This globally unique combination of synchrotron exposure and ultrafast X-ray probing will support the nation's effort to rebuild highly competitive semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S., critical to the tech economy and to national security.

LaNeXT will also enable direct observation of technologies in motion.

"Imagine rattling sounds that you cannot detect when the engine is turned off. These noises can arise from motion-induced material deformations," Schneider said. "Improving our understanding of them could lead to new technical designs that result in more reliable systems-with high relevance for domestic companies and more robust military vehicles and spacecraft."

LaNeXT provides a path toward a new and more energy-efficient synchrotron, featuring more compact technology that could lead to substantial cost reductions for the Big Four-potentially saving the federal government up to $20 billion per year in electricity bills-while introducing new scientific opportunities, which would be tested first nationwide at LSU.

Specific problems LaNeXT is designed to address include:

• Watching the structural rearrangements of biomolecules, such as proteins that control health and disease, on timescales ranging from 30 femtoseconds to seconds, with no need to crystallize samples or compete for scarce XFEL beamtime.
• Tracking the electronic structure of catalysts during electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction, a class of reactions central to converting CO₂ into useful fuels and feedstocks. Understanding how the electronic states of the catalyst evolve in real time during reactions is one of the biggest open problems in clean-energy chemistry.
• Imaging rotating components concealed inside operating machinery, such as turbine blades, fuel injectors and gearboxes. These measurements have direct applications in aerospace, automotive and energy-sector manufacturing.
• Nanostructure engineering of advanced steels, combining LaNeXT's ultrafast probes with nanofabrication to design and characterize alloys with tailored microstructures for infrastructure, defense and energy applications.
• EUV photochemistry for next-generation semiconductor lithography, where understanding the femtosecond-scale chemistry of photoresists is an industry bottleneck.

Impact in Louisiana and Beyond

LaNeXT will operate as a user facility open to scientists nationwide, drawing researchers from universities, national laboratories and industry to Baton Rouge and anchoring an advanced-instrumentation ecosystem in Louisiana. LSU's Louisiana Light Source (formerly the Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices) has supported a multidisciplinary user community for over three decades, and LaNeXT will extend that role into ultrafast science.

The project will serve as a training pipeline for beamline scientists, accelerator physicists and instrumentation engineers. In partnership with Southern University and Xavier University, LaNeXT will give undergraduate and graduate students hands-on roles in design, component construction, commissioning and more.