Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Forefront experiments in many scientific areas for which synchrotron sources provide sufficient flux are nonetheless hindered because detectors cannot collect data fast enough, do not cover sufficiently solid angle, or do no have adequate resolution. Overall, the synchrotron facilities, each of which represents collective investments from funding agencies and user institutions ranging from many hundreds of millions to more than a billion dollars, are effectively significantly underutilized. While this chronic and growing problem plagues facilities around the world, it is particularly acute in the United States, where detector research often has to ride on the coat tails of explicitly science-oriented projects. As a first step toward moving out of this predicament, scientists from the U.S. synchrotron facilities held a national workshop in Washington, DC, on October 30-31, 2000. The Workshop on Detectors for Synchrotron Research aimed to create a national "roadmap" for development of synchrotron-radiation detectors.