A water-cooled monochromator for the B16 Test beamline at the Diamond Light Source: capabilities and performance characterization.

Systematic studies of the performance of a water-cooled X-ray monochromator, designed and built for the B16 Test beamline at the Diamond Light Source, UK, are presented. A technical description of the monochromator is given and the results of commissioning measurements are discussed. Overall, the monochromator satisfies the original specifications well and meets all the major requirements of the versatile beamline. Following its successful implementation on B16, the basic monochromator design has been reproduced and adapted on other Diamond Light Source beamlines, including B18 and B21.

VMXi: a fully automated, fully remote, high-flux in situ macromolecular crystallography beamline.

VMXi is a new high-flux microfocus macromolecular crystallography beamline at Diamond Light Source. The beamline, dedicated to fully automated and fully remote data collection of macromolecular crystals in situ, allows rapid screening of hundreds of crystallization plates from multiple user groups. Its main purpose is to give fast feedback at the complex stages of crystallization and crystal optimization, but it also enables data collection of small and delicate samples that are particularly difficult to harvest using conventional cryo-methods, crystals grown in the lipidic cubic phase, and allows for multi-crystal data collections in drug discovery programs. The beamline is equipped with two monochromators: one with a narrow band-pass and fine energy resolution (optimal for regular oscillation experiments), and one with a wide band-pass and a high photon flux (optimal for fast screening). The beamline has a state-of-the-art detector and custom goniometry that allows fast data collection. This paper describes the beamline design, current status and future plans.

The Delta Robot-A long travel nano-positioning stage for scanning x-ray microscopy.

A new stage design concept, the Delta Robot, is presented, which is a parallel kinematic design for scanning x-ray microscopy applications. The stage employs three orthogonal voice coils, which actuate parallelogram flexures. The design has a 3 mm travel range and achieves rms position jitter, integrated from 1 Hz to 1 kHz, of 2.8 and 1.3 nm perpendicular to the beam and 5.6 nm along the beam direction with loads up to 350 g. The Delta Robot design process used a mechatronics approach of iterative modeling and simulation to develop the system and validate performance. The design considerations, design process, stability, and operational performance on the hard x-ray nanoprobe at Diamond Light Source are presented.

A slow-cooling-rate in situ cell for long-duration studies of mineral precipitation in cold aqueous environments on Earth and other planetary bodies.

Liquid oceans and ice caps, along with ice crusts, have long been considered defining features of the Earth, but space missions and observations have shown that they are in fact common features among many of the solar system's outer planets and their satellites. Interactions with rock-forming materials have produced saline oceans not dissimilar in many respects to those on Earth, where mineral precipitation within frozen seawater plays a significant role in both determining global properties and regulating the environment in which a complex ecosystem of extremophiles exists. Since water is considered an essential ingredient for life, the presence of oceans and ice on other solar system bodies is of great astrobiological interest. However, the details surrounding mineral precipitation in freezing environments are still poorly constrained, owing to the difficulties of sampling and ex situ preservation for laboratory analysis, meaning that predictive models have limited empirical underpinnings. To address this, the design and performance characterization of a transmission-geometry sample cell for use in long-duration synchrotron X-ray powder diffraction studies of in situ mineral precipitation from aqueous ice-brine systems are presented. The cell is capable of very slow cooling rates (e.g. 0.3°C per day or less), and its performance is demonstrated with the results from a year-long study of the precipitation of the hydrated magnesium sulfate phase meridianiite (MgSO4·11H2O) from the MgSO4-H2O system. Evidence from the Mars Rover mission suggests that this hydrated phase is widespread on the present-day surface of Mars. However, as well as the predicted hexagonal ice and meridianiite phases, an additional hydrated sulfate phase and a disordered phase are observed.

New synchrotron powder diffraction facility for long-duration experiments.

A new synchrotron X-ray powder diffraction instrument has been built and commissioned for long-duration experiments on beamline I11 at Diamond Light Source. The concept is unique, with design features to house multiple experiments running in parallel, in particular with specific stages for sample environments to study slow kinetic systems or processes. The instrument benefits from a high-brightness X-ray beam and a large area detector. Diffraction data from the commissioning work have shown that the objectives and criteria are met. Supported by two case studies, the results from months of measurements have demonstrated the viability of this large-scale instrument, which is the world's first dedicated facility for long-term studies (weeks to years) using synchrotron radiation.