Project Beamlines

Much of the year was spent on design work for the six project beamlines, with each completing a preliminary design report (PDR) in September 2010. The completed designs include engineering details sufficiently mature to begin long-lead-time procurements of major beamline systems, such as radiation enclosures and optical systems. Motion controllers are being tested and specifications are being written for a standard unit.

The coherent hard x-ray (CHX) beamline design is complete, with a carefully optimized optics layout that will ensure that the beam stability required for the experiments will be achieved. The endstation design, including the SAXS and WAXS instruments, is complete.

The coherent soft x-ray (CSX) beamline optical design was completed, and the beamline was ready for purchasing the major optical components. The specifications for the elliptically polarized undulators were approved with the insertion device group, and advances were made working with the accelerator group to finalize the design of the straight section.

The hard x-ray nanoprobe (HXN) team continued to develop nanopositioning techniques. Testing of piezo scanning stages and laser interferometers in the lab yielded encouraging results, and a preliminary design of an MLL microscope is in progress.

The inelastic x-ray scattering (IXS) team completed the mirror upgrade of the R&D beamline at NSLS, improving brightness by 10 times. Together with improvement in crystal quality, the resolution function of the CDW-CDW test carried out on the beamline achieved extremely sharp tails, reaching a critical milestone. Optical metrology and x-ray tests of the multilayer Montel mirror were completed and showed expected performance.

The submicron resolution x-ray spectroscopy (SRX) beamline is an in-vacuum undulator beamline that uses K-B mirrors for focusing. It is designed to eventually accomodate a second in-vacuum undulator beamline canted by 2-milliradians and using zone plates for focusing. The K-B beamline design is complete and the endstation design is progressing.

The optical layout of the two branches of the x-ray powder diffraction (XPD) beamline was modeled and optimized to achieve the best possible flux throughput, tailored to the high energy, large divergence beam delivered by the damping wiggler source. For enhanced performance, the optics includes a novel sagittally bent double Laue crystal monochromator similar in concept to the NSLS monochromators in operation at beamlines X17B and X7B. Special attention was devoted to the high power and high heat load management.

Beamline layouts are from preliminary design reports, September 2010