NEW BEAMLINES AT THE SRS

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NEW BEAMLINES AT THE SRS
11 November 2004 - CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory

Beamline 11.1 is a new synchrotron infrared microspectroscopy facility that has recently been completed at Daresbury, and is now being commissioned ready for access by users. The beamline focuses the infrared synchrotron light down to a 10 micron spot which allows high spatial resolution chemical analysis of a wide range of materials from biological tissues to polymers, and from single crystals to archaeological remains. It is anticipated that the beamline will be further enhanced in the near future by the addition of an array detector infrared imaging system.

Beamline 12.1 provides unique structural information in solution from macromolecules such as proteins and carbohydrates. It has been operational for about a year, and is the world's leading synchrotron Circular Dichroism facility. The intensity and spectral range available from the synchrotron for CD allows greater accuracy of structure determination than is possible with conventional "bench top" CD instruments, and also allows millisecond time resolved measurements to be made of protein folding and molecular conformational dynamics.

It has been a long-standing goal of materials scientists and engineers to evaluate the intermediate stages of a manufacturing process accurately and on the same realistic time as the industrial plant, the ultimate aim being to directly correlate the microscopic structure of the material with its macroscopic physical properties. In order to achieve this goal high intensity X-rays are required coupled with detectors capable of high-count rate and excellent time resolution. A new station MPW6.2 has been specifically designed and constructed for this purpose and the combination of a 10-pole wiggler magnet, the Daresbury designed saggital focusing crystals and the X-ray mirrors provide a 1000-fold improvement in the X-ray flux to the experimental area. Detectors utilising RAPID readout electronics have been built with good spatial resolution in order to obtain quantitatively significant data.

The main techniques available on the station are very fast X-ray powder diffraction, wide angle X-ray scattering, small angle X-ray scattering and X-ray absorption spectroscopy. This station is dedicated to the study of materials processes and kinetic systems (e.g. crystallisation and/or nucleation) using any of the above techniques.

http://www.darts.ac.uk

About: CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory
DARTS is a unique service offering solutions to materials characterisation problems that are unattainable in the conventional laboratory. This is possible because it makes use of the Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS). Advantages of using the SRS include:

• The ability to study small or weakly diffracting samples. Improved resolution, enabling structures intractable in the home laboratory to be solved.

• The ability to select the optimum wavelength for a particular application.

• Additional specialised techniques only possible using synchrotron radiation can be exploited.

The DARTS team's ability to access and combine a range of complementary techniques provides information to help manufacturers control processing conditions and modify manufacturing techniques to improve a wide range of products. Even the everyday crisp packet has benefited from DARTS leading edge technology.

Applications can cover materials from agrochemicals, pigments, polypeptides, microporous materials, organometallics, catalyst materials, minerals and samples from processing plants.

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