diffraction – Lightsources.org

Asteroid Bennu to be analysed at Diamond by scientists from the Natural History Museum

2023/12/142023/12/14

These measurements may reveal insights into the origins of life in our solar system

After an amazing journey, a grain from the asteroid Bennu will be brought to Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron, for scientific measurements. The grain is from the 100 milligrams of sample sent to the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, a small fraction of the approximately 70 grams of Bennu rock and dust brought back by NASA’s (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, USA) OSIRIS-REx mission. It will be subject to intensive analysis at the Dual Imaging And Diffraction (DIAD) instrument in Diamond by Dr Ashley King and his team from the NHM and other OSIRIS-REx collaborators at the Open, Oxford and Manchester Universities.

The DIAD beamline at Diamond is a ‘one of a kind’ scientific instrument that can extract chemical composition information and enable virtual dissection at an unprecedented level of detail, non-destructively. This will provide a wealth of scientific data and new knowledge about the asteroid, and the origins of our solar system.

The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx, spacecraft launched to the near-Earth asteroid, Bennu on Sept. 8, 2016. In October 2020 it collected a sample of rocks and dust from its surface 330 million km (205 million miles) from Earth. The material, collected by the NASA mission, took almost three years to be returned to Earth (Utah desert, US) this Sept. 24, 2023.

Read more on the Diamond website

Image: Dr Sharif Ahmed from Diamond Light Source and Dr Ashley King from the Natural History Museum with the Bennu asteroid sample

Credit: Diamond Light Source

The Middle East synchrotron officially opens MS beamline

2021/07/192021/07/19

The 8th of July 2021 marked the inauguration of SESAME’s Materials Science (MS) beamline. The Ambassador of Switzerland to Jordan, H.E. Mr. Lukas Gasser, along with members of his embassy team, and UNESCO’s Representative to Jordan, Ms. Min Jeong Kim, were welcomed to the inaugural ceremony by the Director General of SESAME, Professor Khaled Toukan, and the Directors of SESAME.

In his welcoming remarks, Khalid Toukan pointed out that the beamline now allowed the users of SESAME to obtain diffraction data of a quality unparalleled in any laboratory in the region.

The MS beamline is heavily based on the MS X04SA beamline previously in operation at the Swiss Light Source, and its donation to SESAME by the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) has resulted in SESAME having a powerful and extremely precise tool to investigate matter at the micro-, nano- and atomic-scale.

A ribbon officially inaugurating the beamline was cut by H.E. Mr. Lukas Gasser and Professor Khaled Toukan, together with Ms. Min Jeong Kim.

Work on the MS beamline had started in 2015, with the adaptation of the design of the MS X04SA beamline to the characteristics of SESAME’s machine. In 2016, after receiving the donation of another major component, a detector from the Swiss company Dectris, execution of the project was fast-tracked, and the installation phase took place between 2017 and 2019, which is when SESAME received a diffractometer for the beamline as a donation from the Diamond Light Source. Upon sourcing the necessary equipment, the MS beam was first delivered to SESAME’s experimental station at the end of 2019. Fine tuning and characterization of its performance continued during the Covid-19 pandemic, and in December 2020, the beamline started hosting its first users. A first paper utilizing data taken at the MS beamline has already been published in a high-impact journal.

Read more on the SESAME website

Image: Cutting the ribbon of the MS Beamline (left to right): the Director General of SESAME, Professor Khaled Toukan, the UNESCO Representative to Jordan Ms. Min Jeong Kim, and the Ambassador of Switzerland to Jordan, H.E. Mr. Lukas Gasser Note: all picture participants are Covid-19 Vaccinated.

Credit: © SESAME 2021

New insights into switchable MOF structures at the MX beamlines

2021/05/272021/06/29

Metal-organic framework compounds (MOFs) are widely used in gas storage, material separation, sensor technology or catalysis. A team led by Prof. Dr. Stefan Kaskel, TU Dresden, has now investigated a special class of these MOFs at the MX beamlines of BESSY II. These are “switchable” MOFs that can react to external stimuli. Their analysis shows how the behaviour of the material is related to transitions between ordered and disordered phases. The results have now been published in Nature Chemistry.

Metal-organic framework compounds (MOFs) consist of inorganic and organic groups and are characterised by a large number of pores into which other molecules can be incorporated. MOFs are therefore interesting for many applications, for example for the storage of gases, but also for substance separation, sensor technology or catalysis. Some of these MOF structures react to different guest molecules by changing their structures. They are thus considered switchable.

Read more on the HZB website

Image: View into a MOF crystal exemplified by DUT-8. The massive pores are clearly discernible.

Credit: © TU Dresden

Who stole the light?

2020/10/072020/10/07

Self-induced ultrafast demagnetization limits the amount of light diffracted from magnetic samples at soft x-ray energies.

Free electron X-ray lasers deliver intense ultrashort pulses of x-rays, which can be used to image nanometer-scale objects in a single shot. When the x-ray wavelength is tuned to an electronic resonance, magnetization patterns can be made visible. However, using increasingly intense pulses, the magnetization image fades away. The mechanism responsible for this loss in resonant magnetic scattering intensity has now been clarified.

A team of researchers from Max Born Institute Berlin (Germany), Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (Germany), Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste (Italy) and Sorbonne Université (France), has now precisely recorded the dependence of the resonant magnetic scattering intensity as a function of the x-ray intensity incident per unit area (the “fluence”) on a ferromagnetic domain sample. Via integration of a device to detect the intensity of every single shot hitting the actual sample area, they were able record the scattering intensity over three orders of magnitude in fluence with unprecedented precision, in spite of the intrinsic shot-to-shot variations of the x-ray beam hitting the tiny samples. The experiments with soft x-rays were carried out at the FERMI free-electron x-ray laser in Trieste, Italy.

In the results presented in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers show that while the loss in magnetic scattering in resonance with the Co 2p core levels has been attributed to stimulated emission in the past, for scattering in resonance with the shallower Co 3p core levels this process is not significant. The experimental data over the entire fluence range are well described by simply considering the actual demagnetization occurring within each magnetic domain, which the experimental team had previously characterized with laser-based experiments. Given the short lifetime of the Co 3p core, dominated by Auger decay, it is likely that the hot electrons generated by the Auger cascade, in concert with subsequent electron scattering events, lead to a reshuffling of spin up and spin down electrons transiently quenching the magnetization.

Read more on the ELETTRA website

Image: Schematic sketch of the scattering experiment with two competing processes. The soft x-ray beam (blue line) hits the magnetic sample where it scatters from the microscopic, labyrinth-like magnetization pattern. In this process, an x-ray photon is first absorbed by a Co 3p core level (1). The resulting excited state can then relax either spontaneously (2), emitting a photon in a new direction (purple arrow), or by means the interaction with a second photon via stimulated emission (3). In this last case, the photons are emitted in the direction of the incident beam (blue arrow towards right).

Diamond is set to help develop the first fully electric Bentley and contribute to sustainable luxury mobility

2020/08/072020/09/01

A three-year research project aims to deliver a break-through in e-axle electric powertrains. Led by Bentley Motors, the project will be delivered in partnership with Innovate UK and nine-partners, including Diamond.

Diamond scientists will be working with Bentley Motors on a three-year research study that promises to transform electric vehicle powertrains.

The project will utilise a fully integrated, free from rare-earth magnet e-axle that supports electric vehicle architectures. This reinforces Bentley’s ambition to lead sustainable luxury mobility and introduce the first fully electric Bentley by 2026.

Diamond will be contributing to this ground-breaking project by performing imaging using the unique Joint Engineering, Environment and Processing (JEEP) beamline (I12). I12 will image the motor at full speed to measure the temperature changes using diffraction in the rotor and stator parts of the motor, as the performance is pushed the temperature in the motor increases.

Read more on the Diamond website

Image: OCTOPUS e-axle Image: Bentley Motors

First direct look at how light excites electrons to kick off a chemical reaction

2020/05/012020/05/14

Light-driven reactions are at the heart of human vision, photosynthesis and solar power generation. Seeing the very first step opens the door to observing chemical bonds forming and breaking.

The first step in many light-driven chemical reactions, like the ones that power photosynthesis and human vision, is a shift in the arrangement of a molecule’s electrons as they absorb the light’s energy. This subtle rearrangement paves the way for everything that follows and determines how the reaction proceeds.
Now scientists have seen this first step directly for the first time, observing how the molecule’s electron cloud balloons out before any of the atomic nuclei in the molecule respond.

While this response has been predicted theoretically and detected indirectly, this is the first time it’s been directly imaged with X-rays in a process known as molecular movie-making, whose ultimate goal is to observe how both electrons and nuclei act in real time when chemical bonds form or break.

>Read more on the LCLS at SLAC website

Image: extract, full image here

Collaboration develops sensitive data protocol

2019/08/162019/08/22

MAX IV pairs up with Sprint Bioscience, a listed drug development company, in a new project to improve how companies can benefit from new, faster X-ray fragment screening experiments, while still protecting their valuable information during analysis at FragMAX.

Recently, the project was granted with 500 000 SEK from Sweden’s innovation agency Vinnova.
More or less, all pharmaceutical drugs are molecules binding to proteins in your body. When doing this, they either initiate or inhibit the process in which the target protein is involved. Proteins are in charge of everything from cells dividing at the right moment to the metabolism of the food you eat or signaling in the brain.

>Read more on the MAX IV website

Image: Sample holders
Credit: Ben Libberton

Scientists design organic cathode for high performance batteries

2019/05/302019/06/06

The new, sulfur-based material is more energy-dense, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly than traditional cathodes in lithium batteries.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have designed a new, organic cathode material for lithium batteries. With sulfur at its core, the material is more energy-dense, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly than traditional cathode materials in lithium batteries. The research was published in Advanced Energy Materials on April 10, 2019.

Optimizing cathode materials

From smartphones to electric vehicles, the technologies that have become central to everyday life run on lithium batteries. And as the demand for these products continues to rise, scientists are investigating how to optimize cathode materials to improve the overall performance of lithium battery systems.
“Commercialized lithium-ion batteries are used in small electronic devices; however, to accommodate long driving ranges for electric vehicles, their energy density needs to be higher,” said Zulipiya Shadike, a research associate in Brookhaven’s Chemistry Division and the lead author of the research. “We are trying to develop new battery systems with a high energy density and stable performance.”

>Read more on the NSLS-II website

Image: Lead author Zulipiya Shadike (right) is pictured at NSLS-II’s XPD beamline with lead beamline scientist and co-author Sanjit Ghose (left).

A novel synchrotron technique for studying diffusion in solids

2019/05/232019/05/27

Bragg coherent diffraction imaging (BCDI) offers insights for nanoparticle synthesis

Understanding and controlling how the diffusion process works at the atomic scale is an important question in the synthesis of materials. For nanoparticles, the stability, size, structure, composition, and atomic ordering are all dependent on position inside the particle, and diffusion both affects all of these properties and is affected by them. A more thorough understanding of the mechanisms and effects of diffusion in nanocrystals will help to develop controlled synthesis methods to obtain the particular properties; however, conventional methods for studying diffusion in solids all have limitations.

Given the need for imaging techniques that are sensitive to slower dynamics and allow the diffusion behaviour in individual nanocrystals to be investigated at the atomic scale and in three dimensions (3D), a team of researchers used the strain sensitivity of Bragg coherent diffraction imaging (BCDI) to study the diffusion of iron into individual gold nanocrystals in situ at elevated temperatures. Their work was recently published in the New Journal of Physics.

Image, third of three figures: Reconstructed amplitude and phase images near the centre of the nanocrystals before and after iron deposition (1 pixel = 16.28 nm). The direction of the Q-vector, which is along the (11-1) direction, is shown by the arrow in the control phase images. See all here.
DOI:10.1088/1367-2630/aaebc1

$New lens system for brighter, sharper diffraction images$

New lens system for brighter, sharper diffraction images

2019/04/252019/05/20

Researchers from Brookhaven Lab designed, implemented, and applied a new and improved focusing system for electron diffraction measurements.

To design and improve energy storage materials, smart devices, and many more technologies, researchers need to understand their hidden structure and chemistry. Advanced research techniques, such as ultra-fast electron diffraction imaging can reveal that information. Now, a group of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a new and improved version of electron diffraction at Brookhaven’s Accelerator Test Facility (ATF)—a DOE Office of Science User Facility that offers advanced and unique experimental instrumentation for studying particle acceleration to researchers from all around the world. The researchers published their findings in Scientific Reports, an open-access journal by Nature Research.
Advancing a research technique such as ultra-fast electron diffraction will help future generations of materials scientists to investigate materials and chemical reactions with new precision. Many interesting changes in materials happen extremely quickly and in small spaces, so improved research techniques are necessary to study them for future applications. This new and improved version of electron diffraction offers a stepping stone for improving various electron beam-related research techniques and existing instrumentation.

Image: Mikhail Fedurin, Timur Shaftan, Victor Smalyuk, Xi Yang, Junjie Li, Lewis Doom, Lihua Yu, and Yimei Zhu are the Brookhaven team of scientists that realized and demonstrated the new lens system for as ultra-fast electron diffraction imaging.

Superconductor exhibits “glassy” electronic phase

2019/04/232019/05/08

The study provides valuable insight into the nature of collective electron behaviors and how they relate to high-temperature superconductivity.

At extremely low temperatures, superconductors conduct electricity without resistance, a characteristic that’s already being used in cryogenically cooled power lines and quantum-computer prototypes. To apply this characteristic more widely, however, it’s necessary to raise the temperature at which materials become superconducting. Unfortunately, the exact mechanism by which this happens remains unclear.

Recently, scientists found that electrons in cuprate superconductors can self-organize into charge-density waves—periodic modulations in electron density that hinder the flow of electrons. As this effect is antagonistic to superconductivity, tremendous effort has been devoted to fully characterizing this charge-order phase and its interplay with high-temperature superconductivity.

Image: At low doping levels, the charge correlations in the copper–oxide plane possess full rotational symmetry (C_inf) in reciprocal space (left), in marked contrast to all previous reports of bond-oriented charge order in cuprates. In real space (right), this corresponds to a “glassy” state with an apparent tendency to periodic ordering, but without any preference in orientation (scale bar ~5 unit cells).

A new twist in soft x-ray beams

2019/03/262019/04/03

Light waves, when generated a certain way, can exert twisting forces on matter. In the visible-light regime, such beams have been used as “optical tweezers” to trap and manipulate tiny particles (like a tractor beam) or to detect rotational motion in targets. Now, the ability to generate beams with a specific type of rotational character, known as orbital angular momentum (OAM), has been extended to the soft x-ray regime. The work lays the foundation for a new type of soft x-ray contrast mechanism that could provide access to previously hidden material properties.
In a recently published Nature Photonics paper, researchers from the Advanced Light Source (ALS) and the University of Oregon reported on the fabrication and testing of specialized diffraction gratings that, when placed in the coherent light of ALS Beamline 12.0.2, produce OAM soft x-ray beams of exceptionally high quality.

Image: A flower-like interference pattern generated by a special diffraction grating that superposes two different orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes on a soft x-ray beam.

Optical “tweezers” combine with X-rays to enable analysis of crystals in liquids

2019/03/212019/04/01

Understanding how chemical reactions happen on tiny crystals in liquid solutions is central to a variety of fields, including materials synthesis and heterogeneous catalysis, but obtaining such an understanding requires that scientists observe reactions as they occur.

By using coherent X-ray diffraction techniques, scientists can measure the exterior shape of and strain in nanocrystalline materials with a high degree of precision. However, carrying out such measurements requires precise control of the position and angles of the tiny crystal with respect to the incoming X-ray beam. Traditionally, this has meant adhering or gluing the crystal to a surface, which in turn strains the crystal, thus altering its structure and potentially affecting reactivity.

Image: Scientists have found a way to use “optical tweezers” by employing lasers, a mirror and a light modulator to anchor a crystal in solution. The “tweezers” have made it possible to conduct X-ray diffraction measurements of a crystal suspended in solution.
Credit: Robert Horn/Argonne National Laboratory.

Doped epitaxial graphene close to the Lifshitz transition

2018/11/142018/12/06

Graphene, an sp²bonded sheet of carbon atoms, is still attracting lots of interest almost 15 years after its discovery. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) is a uniquely powerful method to study the electronic structure of graphene and it has been used extensively to study the coupling of electrons to lattice vibrations (phonons) in doped graphene. This electron-phonon coupling (EPC) manifests as a so-called “kink” feature in the electronic band structure probed by ARPES. What is much less explored is the effect of EPC on the phonon structure. A very accurate probe of the phonons in graphene is Raman spectroscopy.
M.G. Hell and colleagues from Germany, Italy, Indonesia, and Japan combined ARPES (carried out at the BaDelPhbeamline – see Figure 1) with low energy electron diffraction (LEED) and Raman spectroscopy (carried out at the University of Cologne in Germany) in a clever way to fully understand the coupled electron-phonon system in alkali metal doped graphene. LEED revealed ordered (1×1), (2×2), and (sqrt3xsqrt3)R30°adsorbate patterns with increasing alkali metal deposition. The ARPES analysis yielded not only the carrier concentration but also the EPC coupling constant. Ultra-High Vacuum (UHV) Raman spectra carried out using identically prepared samples with the very same carrier concentrations provided the EPC induced changes in the phonon frequencies.

Image: Top: ARPES spectra along the Γ-K-M high symmetry direction of the hexagonal Brillouin zone for Cs doped graphene/Ir(111) with increasing Cs deposition. The Dirac energy E_D and the observed LEED reconstruction are also indicated. Bottom: Corresponding Fermi surfaces at the indicated charge carrier concentration.

Ultralow-fluence for phase-change process

2018/09/142018/09/19

Ultrafast active materials with tunable properties are currently investigated for producing successful memory and data-processing devices. Among others, Phase-Change Materials (PCMs) are eligible for this purpose. They can reversibly switch between a high-conductive crystalline state (SET) and a low-conductive amorphous state (RESET), defining a binary code. The transformation is triggered by an electrical or optical pulse of different intensity and time duration. 3D Ge-Sb-Te based alloys, of different stoichiometry, are already employed in DVDs or Blu-Ray Disks, but they are expected to function also in non-volatile memories and RAM. The challenge is to demonstrate that the scalability to 2D, 1D up to 0D of the GST alloys improves the phase-change process in terms of lower power threshold and faster switching time. Nowadays, GST thin films and nanoparticles have been synthetized and have beenshown to function with competitive results.
A team of researchers from the University of Trieste and the MagneDyn beamline at Fermi demonstrated the optical switch from crystalline to amorphous state of Ge2Sb2Te5nanoparticles (GST NPs) with size <10 nm, produced via magnetron sputtering by collaborators from the University of Groeningen. Details were reported in the journal Nanoscale.
This work aims at showing the very low power limit of an optical pulse needed to amorphize crystalline Ge2Sb2Te5 nanoparticles. Particles of 7.8 nm and 10.4 nm diameter size were deposited on Mica and capped with ~200nm of PMMA. Researchers made use of a table-top Ti:Sapphire regenerative amplified system-available at the IDontKerr (IDK) laboratory (MagneDyn beamline support laboratory) to produce pump laser pulses at 400 nm, of ~100 fs and with a repetition rate from 1kHz to single shot.

Image (extract): Trasmission Electron Microscopy image of the nanoparticles sample. Ultafast single-shot optical process with fs-pulse at 400 nm. Microscope images of amorphized and amorphized/ablated areas obtained on the nanoparticles sample. Comparison of amorphization threshold fluences between thin films and nanoparticles cases.
Please see here the entire image.

A super-relaxed myosin state to offset hypertrophic cardiomyopathy

2018/09/102018/09/24

At its most basic level, the proper functioning of the heart depends upon the intricate interaction of proteins that trigger, maintain, and control the muscular contractions and relaxations of this vital organ. Disruption of those interactions can cause serious pathologies such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). Such disruptions can originate with mutations in the primary motor protein involved in heart contraction, ß-cardiac myosin, which can alter the rate of ATP hydrolysis and have been hypothesized to destabilize its super-relaxed state (SRX). Researchers investigated the stabilizing action of mavacamten, a cardiac drug currently in phase 3 clinical trials, on the ß-cardiac myosin super-relaxed state and its possible therapeutic effects on HCM. Their work, which included electron microscopy and low-angle x-ray diffraction at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Photon Source (APS), was published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences of the United States of America.

Previous work had hinted that a folded state of the myosin protein, seen both in purified form and in isolated filaments and known as the interacting-heads motif or IHM, could be analogous to the SRX state, although this has not yet been demonstrated experimentally. It has been proposed that mutations causing HCM disrupt this state, resulting in a higher percentage of myosin heads being available for interaction with actin and leading to the hypercontractility of cardiac tissue seen in HCM. These investigators, from MyoKardia, Inc., the Stanford University School of Medicine, the Illinois Institute of Technology, Exemplar Genetics, the Harvard Medical School, and the University of California, San Francisco, first studied this possibility using three separate purified ß-cardiac myosin constructs (25-heptad heavy meromysin [HMM], two-heptad HMM, and short S1), finding that a fraction of their basal ATPase rates were within the range of 0.002-0.004 s^-1which defines the SRX state.

Image: The figure (a) shows a diffraction pattern from untreated muscle compared to treated muscle on the right. Intensification of the x-ray reflections from the treated muscle indicate a highly ordered “super-relaxed” state of myosin motors. Figure (b) shows the myosin heads in the compact “interacting head motif” which the heads adopt in the super-relaxed state allowing them to be packed closely and tightly on the surface of muscle thick filaments.