Jason Jamerson

Our team built a highly accurate digital twin of the Louisiana Light Source, LSU's synchrotron facility, to support an NSF grant application to upgrade the facility and expand its capabilities, including a new beamline.

The twin reproduces the facility with precision across its architecture, the synchrotron itself, equipment, supporting facilities, and tooling. It represents the current facility and the proposed upgrades in the same environment, so a new beamline or a change in configuration can be evaluated in the context of the building it will occupy. The accuracy supports engineering discussion, not just illustration.

A synchrotron is a difficult facility to reason about from drawings alone. Its most important components sit inside shielding and dense hardware, and a proposed change touches spatial constraints, radiation safety, and existing infrastructure at once. The twin makes those relationships visible. Researchers and engineers can weigh where a new beamline fits, what it displaces, and how it interacts with the storage ring and the surrounding hall before any decision becomes concrete.

The twin also communicates the plan to the people who evaluate it. A grant reviewer, a university stakeholder, or a facility partner can see the proposed expansion in context rather than inferring it from a floor plan. An accurate twin gives every audience the same clear reference for what the upgrade involves and what it will produce.

The Louisiana Light Source is one of only two university-owned and operated synchrotron facilities in the nation. Its beamlines probe matter at the atomic scale, and its work centers on critical minerals, semiconductors, and advanced materials. The upgrade this twin supports extends those capabilities, and the twin is part of how that case gets made.