NECAT Beamline

The Northeastern Collaborative Access Team (NE-CAT) facility at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory is managed by Cornell University and consists of seven member institutions:

  • Columbia University
  • Cornell University
  • Harvard University
  • Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Rockefeller University
  • Yale University.

    • Primary funding for this project comes from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Additional financial support for NE-CAT comes from the member institutions.

    Status of NE-CAT Sector 24 Activities

     

    April 2007  

     

    24-ID Phase 1 Beam Line User Operations

    The APS 2007-1 run cycle ended on April 17 and the accelerator will now be shut down for scheduled maintenance until May 30. The following pie chart shows the beam line usage for the entire 2007-1 run.

     

    During the month of April, 100% of the available beam time was used by NE-CAT institutional users and APS General Users. Once again, all users reported good experiments and the entire beam line performed very well.

    24-ID Phase 2 Fixed-Energy Beam Line Installation and Commissioning

    Crystallographic commissioning by several NE-CAT members in March demonstrated that the 24-ID-E beam line produced high-quality data, comparable to that obtained with the 24-ID-C beam line and the beam line operated at a high-degree of reliability. Having demonstrated that the beam line is fully functional, use of the beam line in April was totally dedicated to installing and bringing into operation the MD2 micro-diffractometer. With the aid of Maatel engineers, the few hardware problems identified during installation in March were quickly corrected. The MD2 software was successfully interfaced with the beam line Console control system using Swiss Light Source EPICS I/O software provided by Maatel. In the few days remaining in the APS operations schedule, a major milestone was achieved with data taken on a number of samples using a shaped 20 micron beam. Below are several pictures taken at the time that the very first data sets were taken, on April 17.

     

    1.Preparing to take data ; 2. Aligning the crystal; 3. First successful data set

     

    The first data frame

    These early experiments demonstrated that, to first order the integrated system, consisting of the MD2, ADSC detector, and the Console control system, was fully operable. Also, these early experiments identified a number of features that could be improved to provide even higher quality data and improved reliability. These improvements will be made during the May APS shut down of accelerator operations. The most important improvement needed to be made is replacement of the Swiss Light Source I/O software. This software was shown to be inadequately robust for reliable production work- frequently crashing and needing to be rebooted. Another area of improvement which will be made is to replace the relatively long helium-filled x-ray flight path with vacuum in order to further minimize scattering and improve signal to background noise. Also, Maatel has committed to replacing the sample illuminating light source with their new LED based light source and re-manufacture several of the spare apertures and capillaries provided earlier.

    The following photograph shows the current state of installation of the MD2.

     

     

     

     

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