Claude Pradervand

PRIGo: a new multi-axis goniometer for macromolecular crystallography

The design and performance of the new multi-axis goniometer PRIGo developed at the Swiss Light Source at Paul Scherrer Institute is described.

D3, the new diffractometer for the macromolecular crystallography beamlines of the Swiss Light Source

A new diffractometer for microcrystallography has been developed for the three macromolecular crystallography beamlines of the Swiss Light Source.

Automatic loop centring with a high-precision goniometer head at the SLS macromolecular crystallography beamlines

An automated loop-centring program and a high-precision goniometer head used at the Swiss Light Source are described.

Design and performance of the flexural-hinge-based mirror bender at the SLS protein crystallography beamline X06SA

The mirror bender installed at the SLS protein crystallography beamline is designed to be capable of adjusting the vertical phase space of the undulator to the acceptance of protein crystals, i.e. to produce micro-beams as well as essentially parallel beams. The two-moment bender is based on the flexural hinge design pioneered at the ESRF but adapted to high-vacuum by making use of in-vacuum motors and high resolution worm-gears. Special care was taken in the design and fabrication of the clamps and the application of the clamping torque. The Rh-coated fused silica substrate (Zeiss) has a free length of 400 mm and a thickness of 30 mm. Metrology tests at ESRF indicate the high quality of the mirror and the bender. Over the useful length of 350 mm the meridional slope error was found to be 0.17-0.3 μrad (rms) prior to, and less than 0.5 μrad after clamping to the bender. In practice this allows the full central cone of an in-vacuum undulator to be focussed to 7 μm at an image distance of 7.1 m and to 2.1 μm at 1.75 m, corresponding to effective slope errors of less than 0.25 μrad. The bending is very reproducible and is well described by an interaction matrix. Finally, the long range tails were measured in the context of the generation of fs-pulses by means of bunch slicing. Their level cannot be attributed to the surface roughness of 2.9 Å (rms) but rather to scattering from other beamline components such as Be-windows.

Technical Report: Industrial Use of the SLS-MX Beamlines

The Swiss Light Source, located at the Paul Scherrer Institut, is a third-generation synchrotron light source characterized by its exceptional stability and continuous top-up mode of operation. With a storage ring energy of 2.4 GeV, it provides photon beams of high brightness for research in materials science, biology and chemistry.

Temporal diagnostics from photons: the experience with the PALM

The Photon Arrival and Length Monitor (PALM), a THz streak camera device developed by PSI for non-destructive hard x-ray measurements of photon pulse length and arrival time versus a pump laser[1], was brought to the SACLA XFEL[2] in Japan in a cross-calibration temporal diagnostics campaign after an initial experiment where only the PALM was being used[3]. The device was used with 9 keV pink beam and a 9.0 and 8.8 keV two-color mode, successfully measuring the temporal ifnromation of the pulses for several different FEL operating conditions. The most interesting achievement is the PALM’s ability to measure two arrival times of the two colorors as tey are shifted against each other by the FEL, opening up new possibilities in temporal accuracy for two-color experiments. SwissFEL will employ two such devices at the end stations for use by both operators and experimenters to improve the operation of the FEL and to better interpret experimental data. References [1]P. N. Juranic et. al, Journal of Instrumentation (2014) 9. [2]T. Ishikawa et. al., Nature Photonics (2012) 6(8). [3] P. N. Juranic et. al., Optics Express (2014) 22.