Tag: New Beamline

Sapoti: X-ray microscopy’s new frontier at Sirius

Sapoti: X-ray microscopy’s new frontier at Sirius

Designed to achieve resolutions on the order of 1 nanometer, the Sapoti station of the Carnaúba beamline combines cryogenics, ultra-high vacuum, and cutting-edge mechatronics engineering to reveal structures at the atomic scale

Sapoti (Scanning Analysis by PtychO for Tomographic Imaging) is one of the two experimental stations of the Carnaúba beamline at Sirius. The facility is one of the most sophisticated and challenging stations ever developed at the Brazilian accelerator. Its goal is to achieve resolutions on the order of 1 nanometer in coherent X-ray imaging and tomography, a performance that places it among the world’s most precise instruments in synchrotron light-based microscopy.  

The experimental stations of the Carnaúba beamline

The Carnaúba beamline operates in the 2.05 to 15 keV energy range, and was designed to perform simultaneous measurements with multiple X-ray analytical techniques, including diffraction, spectroscopy, fluorescence, and luminescence, as well as two- and three-dimensional imaging. It is the longest line at Sirius and uses a highly bright beam from an undulator, exploring the full potential for coherence and intensity that a fourth-generation synchrotron light source can provide.

Its infrastructure houses two complementary experimental stations. The Tarumã station was designed for in situ, in vivo (with plants), and cryogenic experiments, operating in an open environment with high flexibility for different types of samples. Sapoti operates in ultra-high vacuum and cryogenic conditions, which ensures even greater thermal and mechanical stability, leading to better spatial resolutions, as well as better conditions for experiments at the lower energy limit.

Read more on the Sirius website

Image: Part of the Carnaúba beamline’s infrastructure at Sirius. The beamline features two experimental stations located 136 and 142 m from the X-ray source, a vertically polarized undulator

Credit: Sirius

First official users at FaXToR

First official users at FaXToR

The new beamline of the ALBA Synchrotron, devoted to fast X-ray tomography and radiography, is in full swing. It has recently welcomed the first official users with an experiment on the durability of green cements. They are scientists from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and the Universitat de Barcelona investigating on new methods to find more sustainable cements.

Building a new beamline is a highly complex project that covers several critical phases, from the design to the construction, to the team recruitment and the commissioning, until you achieve a high-performance analytical instrument, ready for the scientific community. This is the result of a period that can go from 3 to 5 years approximately, including countless hours of dedication from the scientific and technical teams involved. Therefore, hosting the first official experiment is a milestone that deserves huge celebration.

FaXToR is a versatile beamline to perform quasi-real-time 3D computed tomography, being key to study the dynamics of certain processes at the micrometric scale using X-rays. It serves a wide range of scientific fields, including materials science, biology, paleontology, earth sciences, cultural heritage and industrial applications.

After its successful commissioning and the friendly users’ experiments, now FaXToR is in operation having welcomed the first official users recently. Researchers from the department of Architecture and Civil Engineering from the Universitat Politènica de Barcelona and from the department of Mineralogy, Petrology and Applied Geology from the Universitat de Barcelona have studied the properties and performance of different novel low-carbon cements at the new ALBA beamline.

The new products can result in more environmentally friendly constructions, helping to reduce the carbon footprint of the global building industry. The cement industry is responsible for approximately 5% of global carbon dioxide output and concrete is the second most consumed substance on Earth, surpassed only by water.

Read more on ALBA website

Image: Group picture including first official users at FaXToR and members of the beamline

CHESS receives $20M from NSF for new X-ray beamline

CHESS receives $20M from NSF for new X-ray beamline

The U.S. National Science Foundation has awarded the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) nearly $20 million to build a new precision X-ray beamline for research on biological and environmental systems.

The X-rays for Life, Environmental, Agriculture and Plant sciences (XLEAP) beamline will be an important resource for the U.S. scientific community, filling a need for X-ray fluorescence-based technology supporting biological and biogeochemical research.

“We are thrilled to receive this funding from the NSF for the XLEAP beamline,” said Joel Brock, CHESS director. “This investment is not only a significant step forward for CHESS but also highlights the importance of advancing precision X-ray studies in the realm of agriculture, biology, and environmental sciences.

“XLEAP will be a game-changer, allowing researchers to explore live soil and plant systems under controlled growth conditions, paving the way for groundbreaking discoveries.”

Scientists at CHESS hope to develop a better understanding of the carbon cycle, which could lead to the development of safer and more nutritious crops.

“This $20 million federal investment will supercharge Cornell’s cutting-edge CHESS Lab and bring us to the next frontier of understanding the elemental and microscopic details of organisms.” said Senator Schumer. “When CHESS faced major cuts in federal support 10 years ago, I fought tooth and nail to ensure its pioneering research and hundreds of good-paying jobs would remain here in Upstate New York, and now this latest boost in federal investment shows that CHESS is top of its class not just in America, but the world.

“The addition of the new XLEAP beamline could not be in better hands at CHESS,” Schumer said, “and is just the latest in showing how Ithaca is leading the way in making Upstate NY a global leader in research and technology.”

“XLEAP is a perfect example of enabling technology that allows for fundamental research that creates knowledge that can be put to use addressing societal challenges,” said Susan Marqusee, NSF assistant director for biological sciences. “NSF is proud to support this key infrastructure that holds the potential to help advance the bioeconomy, build a resilient planet, and more.”

“X-rays are a really powerful tool for visualizing the chemical composition of complex structures like soils and plants,” said Louisa Smieska, XLEAP beamline scientist. “XLEAP is special because it will allow researchers to study live soil and plant systems in controlled growth conditions, not only in a steady state, but when we expose those systems to changes, such as the nutrients available, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, or adding nanoparticles, fungi, bacteria, or microplastics.”

By combining state-of-the-art technology and expertise at CHESS with other world-class research facilities at Cornell, XLEAP will aid in the development of tools suited to answer questions of fundamental biology, biomedical sciences, geology, environmental science, materials science, and cultural heritage.

Read more on the CHESS website

Image: School of Integrate Plant Science (SIPS) research associate Ju-Chen Chia and XLEAP Beamline Scientist Louisa Smieska examine plants in the SIPS growth chambers

Watch the assembly of the Grand Tube at the APS

Watch the assembly of the Grand Tube at the APS

The Advanced Photon Source (APS) Upgrade will result in X-ray beams that are up to 500 times brighter than those generated by the original APS. But that’s only half the story. The upgrade team is also building seven new beamlines, constructing critical infrastructure to enable two more beamlines to be built, and updating many other experiment stations around the ring. 

Work on the beamlines is ramping up. One of the most visible recent projects has been the assembly of the Grand Tube at beamline 9-ID. The Grand Tube is a 70-foot-long enclosure that will enable a new X-ray technique called Coherent Surface Scattering Imaging (CSSI). This will allow scientists to image extremely small materials in three dimensions on a scale previously unattainable. 

The Grand Tube, weighing 100,000 pounds, arrived at Argonne in four sections and took three weeks to assemble. The video below shows the scale of the enclosure and the process of putting it together on the APS experiment floor.

Watch the Grand Tube assemly video here

ForMAX beamline is now open for experiments

ForMAX beamline is now open for experiments

ForMAX, the newest beamline at MAX IV, is now officially open for experiments. The focus will be research on new, sustainable materials from the forest, but the beamline will also be useful for research in many other fields and industries, including food, textiles, and life science.

ForMAX is specially designed for advanced studies on wood-based materials. It allows in-situ multiscale structural characterization from nm to mm length scales by combining full-field tomographic imaging, small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering (SWAXS), and scanning SWAXS imaging – in a single instrument.

The beamline is an initiative where several market-leading industry companies, mainly from the paper and pulp industry, and academia have joined forces. The construction work has been funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and the operational costs are funded by the industry through Treesearch, a national collaborative platform for academic and industrial research in new materials from the forest.

One goal with ForMAX is to facilitate the development of new, wood-based products that can replace today’s plastic products.

Read more on the MAX IV website

Image: ForMAX beamline

Credit: Anna Sandahl, MAX IV

New beamline provides state-of-the-art imaging capability

New beamline provides state-of-the-art imaging capability

The new Micro Computed Tomography (MCT) beamline is the first instrument to become operational as part of the $94 million Project BRIGHT program, which will see the completion of eight new beamlines at ANSTO’s Australian Synchrotron.

The BRIGHT beamlines greatly expand the investigational power and throughput of the Australian Synchrotron with new capabilities not covered by existing instruments.

Despite a series of setbacks and delays due to COVID-19, a team of instrument scientists, engineers, project officers, and technicians achieved first light on MCT on 21 November 2021 at 8:32 pm.

It is a significant technical achievement that is captured and recorded for posterity with a black and white image of the ‘beam’, which means the synchrotron light has been successfully directed from the main ring to the new beamline.

Micro-CT uses X-rays produced by the Australian Synchrotron to reveal a detailed picture of the inside of an object, slice by slice, non-destructively. The instrument produces a series of projected images captured sequentially while the sample is rotated. Using high-performance computing infrastructure and software, a three-dimensional object can be reconstructed from the projected images.

Read more on the ANSTO website

Image: (left-to-right) Chris Hall (IMBL), Gary Ruben (Scientific Computing), Tingting Feng (Scientific Computing), Daniel Häusermann (IMBL), Andrew Stevenson (MCT), Anton Maksimenko (IMBL), Adam Walsh (MCT), Benedicta Arhatari (MCT), Haopeng Shen (CSIRO user), Sherry Mayo (CSIRO user), Matthew Cameron (IMBL)

Aleksei Kotlov’s #My1stLight

Aleksei Kotlov’s #My1stLight

Aleksei was responsible for setting up the new P66 beamline at PETRA III at DESY

Setting up the P66 beamline was a challenging time. The years of discussions, iterations, doubts, calculations, ordering of parts, and construction end at some point with commissioning of the beamline. Only then could you see the final result of your work and see that all decisions were right. To me personally it was like the birth of a baby. Suddenly you realize, that small beam spot on the sample is a big event for you and whole beamline community and to make it happen you have invested a significant part of your life.

Image: Aleksei on the P66 beamline at PETRA III

Ryan Tappero’s #My1stLight

Ryan Tappero’s #My1stLight

Ryan is the XFM Lead Beamline Scientist at NSLS-II on Long Island, New York. His #My1stLight celebrates the night back in 2017 when the beamline succeeded in taking first light! A smiling team AND results. Definitely worth remembering as part of our 75 Years of Science with Synchrotron Light #My1stLight campaign

Read more about NSLS-II’s XFM beamline here

Opening Ceremony for the new ASTRA (SOLABS) beamline

Opening Ceremony for the new ASTRA (SOLABS) beamline

On 29 June 2022, the official opening ceremony was held for the ASTRA beamline (formerly SOLABS), a beamline dedicated to measurements using X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) in the energy range of 1 keV to 15 keV. The ceremony was attended by a number of distinguished guests along with the international team involved in building the beamline.

International cooperation is the key to success.

The ASTRA beamline was created thanks to the cooperation of 4 scientific institutions, the Hochschule Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences (Germany), Synchrotron Light Research Institute (Thailand), the Institute of Physics at Bonn University (Germany), and the SOLARIS Center.

Read more on the Solaris website

Image: Starting from right to left: Prof. Alexander Prange (Hochschule Niederrhein), Dr Thomas Grünewald (Hochschule Niederrhein), Prof. Stanisław Kistryn (Jagiellonian University), Prof. Marek Stankiewicz (SOLARIS, JU), Dr Michael Groß (Consul General of Germany), Prof. Josef Hormes (University of Bonn). Further Dr Alexey Maximenko (SOLARIS), Dr Henning Lichtenberg (Hochschule Niederrhein), Marcel Piszak (SOLARIS) – credit Solaris Synchrotron. 

ALBA initiates new beamline

ALBA initiates new beamline

3Sbar (Surface Structure and Spectroscopy at 1 bar) is the name of the next ALBA beamline that will be extremely useful to provide answers to environment protection. 3Sbar is a unique instrument that will provide unprecedented insight on the understanding of fundamental processes in catalytic reactions. The project, funded by the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan within the framework of the NextGenerationEU, will enter operation in 2026.

The 3Sbar project has been chosen as ALBA 14th beamline. It will allow simultaneous photoemission experiments at 1 bar gas pressures and surface X ray diffraction. The electronic and atomic structures will be both probed during surface chemical reactions and catalytic operando reactions. The products of the reactions will also be analysed by gas phase photoemission.

This new beamline will be key to understand the correlation between chemical reactions and structural changes at atmospheric pressures, which represents a big step ahead for fundamental research in surface chemistry and catalysis. It will allow to get a deep insight in the basic processes determining the efficiencies of catalysts under industrial operating pressures.

3Sbar will be extremely useful to provide answers to environmental protection, challenges such as CO2 reduction, the wastewater treatment, development of environmentally friendly industrial catalytic processes or recycling of greenhouse gases.

The beamline, adaptable to many different sample environments, will serve a wide community of users at a national and international level, from academy and industrial worlds.

Its estimated cost is 9 million euros, which have been granted by the Ministry of Science and Innovation through the European Recovery and Resilience Facility within the NextGenerationEU Programme. It covers the construction and staff positions needed for designing and operating this new beamline. Two new job positions are open now. The detailed design of the beamline starts now, the construction is expected to finish in 2025 and the instrument will be in operation by 2026.

Read more on the ALBA website

New techniques available at SOLARIS synchrotron

New techniques available at SOLARIS synchrotron

From 2022, National Synchroton Radiation Center SOLARIS provides access to two new research techniques. Access to the Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscope and X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy beamline optimized for measurements in the soft and tender energy range, will be possible in the next call for proposals, in March 2022.

Scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM) is a method to obtain a microscopic image of the raster-scanned sample by detecting the transmission intensity of the focused X-rays. The STXM is one of the two end stations of the DEMETER beamline in NSRC SOLARIS. The operating principle of the STXM is scanning of the sample in the focus of the Fresnel zone plate, which for this device is the lens focusing X-rays. In the next step, the detector measures the intensity of the radiation passing through the sample and, on the basis of the intensity images recorded by the detector, it is possible to calculate the absorption X-ray radiation in a selected place of the tested system. The most important measurement mode in STXM is the so-called “image stack” – a series of images are collected as a function of photon energy to obtain a dataset with space (XY) and energy (E) dimensions. A local absorption spectrum can be obtained from the arbitrary region of interest at the image. It allows a detail chemical composition analysis of a measured sample. The source for the STXM end station is elliptically polarized undulator, which enables to cover the energy range from 100 to 2000 eV. The undulator allows measurements using linear, circular and elliptical polarization. Detailed information about the STXM end station you can find here: https://synchrotron.uj.edu.pl/en_GB/linie-badawcze/demeter/STXM.

X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy beamline – SOLABS is a bending magnet beamline dedicated to X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) in the energy range from 1 keV to 15 keV. The beamline was especially designed for XAS measurements in the tender X-ray range, i.e., at the K absorption edges of important elements such as P, S, Si, Al and Mg. Besides, the energy range also includes K-edges of heavier elements up to Se, L-edges of elements up to Bi and some M-edges of elements including U, which allows investigation of a variety of highly relevant materials. Due to this straightforward concept without any optical components such as lenses or mirrors, SOLABS can be quickly aligned and easily operated.  At the beamline spectroscopic experiments in different measurement modes and with various sample environments are possible. XAS is a non-destructive, element-specific characterization method that can be applied to both crystalline and amorphous materials, liquids and samples in the gas phase. Detailed information about the SOLABS beamline and the features of its end station can be found here: https://synchrotron.uj.edu.pl/en_GB/linie-badawcze/solabs

Agnieszka Cudek

The Head of Communication, SOLARIS National Synchrotron Radiation Centre

To apply for beamtime, please visit the SOLARIS website

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

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: 

PHELIX beamline is ready to research

PHELIX beamline is ready to research

Synchrotron light has finally been observed for the first time on a sample at the end station of the experimental beamline PHELIX. This success is the crowning achievement of three years of hard work designing, constructing, fitting, and tuning its components to the synchrotron beam.   

The installation of this new beamline began in mid-2018. In March of 2020, the final elements were delivered. Then on 18th September 2020, the scientific supervisors of beamline, Dr. Magdalena Szczepanik – Ciba and Tomasz Sobol, announced readiness for test experiments using the synchrotron beam.  

The first results testing the capabilities with the active beam of the analyser at the PHELIX end station were performed using the sample of gold in the presence of a specialist from the SPECS company, Dr. Robert Reichelt. As  a result of testing this calibration material, among others, the XPS Au4f spectrum was acquired (see pic.1). Additionally, an angle – resolved and spin – resolved measurements were performed .

During the latest open call for the beamtime the applications on the PHELIX beamline where included for the first time. This line will use soft X-ray radiation. The end-station will enable a wide range of spectroscopic and absorption researches, characterised by different surface sensitivity. Besides acquiring standard, high-resolution spectra, it will allow e.g. for the mapping of band structure in three dimensions and for the detection of spin in three dimensions.  

Users will thus be able to conduct research on new materials, thin films, and multi-layer systems, catalysers and biomaterials, as well as research on solids, on spin-polarised surface states, and on chemical reactions taking place on the surface.

Read more on the SOLARIS website

Image:  From left Tomasz Sobol, Dr. Robert Reichelt, Dr. Magdalena Szczepanik – Ciba. Credit – Solaris