Installation of SESAME’s HESEB soft X-ray beamline starts

From 9th to 27th January, a team from the German company FMB Feinwerk- und Meßtechnik GmbH in Berlin that was awarded the contract for construction of HESEB, the Helmholtz-SESAME Beamline for soft X-ray spectroscopy, together with SESAME’s team, installed the complete front-end and optics of the beamline at the ID 11 port of the SESAME ring.

In 2019, five research centers of the German Helmholtz Association, DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron), FZJ (Forschungszentrum Jülich), HZB (Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin), HZDR (Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf), and KIT (Karlsruher Institut für Technologie), joined forces to implement a new, state-of-the-art soft X-ray beamline at SESAME. The HESEB project is being generously funded to the order of 3.5 M€ by the Initiative & Networking Fund of the Helmholtz Association.

The source will be a refurbished BESSY-II UE56 APPLE-II undulator provided by HZB.

HESEB will be the first soft X-ray beamline at SESAME and will significantly expand the research capabilities available to the user community in the Middle East and neighbouring regions. The undulator’s ability to provide linearly to circularly polarized light makes the beamline very suitable for materials science applications, especially magnetic materials. Its plane grating monochromator uses exchangeable gratings to cover a photon energy range from 70 eV to 2000 eV.

Image: The HESEB project team during installation at SESAME of the front-end and optics of the beamline

Credit: © SESAME 2022

Read more on the SESAME website and see a time-lapse video of the HESEB installation below: