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

     

    November / December 2007  

     

    Beam Line Utilization

     24-ID-C Variable-Energy Insertion-Device Beam Line

     On December 19, APS shut down accelerator operations for a month long preventative maintenance period. During this recent run period, 2007-3 which took place from October 2 to December 19, NE- CAT’s variable-energy insertion- device beam line 24-ID-C was fully utilized by its institutional members and “core collaborators” and APS General Users. The distribution of allocated time is shown in the pie chart below. As can be seen from this pie chart, as the beam line has matured into full operation, the time allocated to General Users is now 34% and continually growing to NE- CAT’s 50% target goal.

     

    The following figure shows the growth of the number of users using 24-ID-C. It should be noted as the beam line usage reaches full capacity, the total number of users using the beam line is expected to reach an asymptotic level of ~120 users per run cycle.

    Throughout this entire 2007-3 run cycle, the 24-ID-C beam line operated without any significant outage and no user group lost any significant amount of time due to failures of the beam line.

     

    24-ID-E Fixed-Energy Micro-Diffraction Insertion-Device Beam Line

    During its commissioning period, usage of the new 24-ID-E fixed-energy micro-diffraction beam has risen continually. With this beam line now declared fully operational and open to the General User Program for the 2008-1 run period, we anticipate that this beam line, as 24-ID-C, will be fully booked by users. Users of the MD2 micro-diffractometer have been very enthusiastic users – many have for the first time been able to obtain structural data previously unobtainable. Only one user group lost a significant amount of time, ~8 hours, during the entire one-year commissioning period due to a failure of the chiller which cools the CCD chips in the ADSC detector.

     

    Sample Placement Robotics System

    More and more users of 24-ID-C have been requesting a sample placement robotic system to greatly speed up the screening of large numbers of crystals. To meet this request, NE- CAT has been modifying and upgrading the ALS-type sample placement robotics system previously used at 8-BM for installation on 24-ID-C. The major modification needed was to reverse the “handedness” of the robot, i.e., looking downstream from the source the robot must be mounted to the left side of the goniometer rather than the right side as was the case on 8-BM. The necessary modifications and upgrades have now been completed and the robot tested. A photograph of the sample placement robot being tested is shown in the following photograph. The robot will be installed on the beam line during the January accelerator shutdown and rapidly be commissioned for usage early in February, 2008 by the users.

     

     

    Resource Advisory Committee Meeting

    The NE- CAT Resource Advisory Committee met at the NE- CAT facility on Friday, November 16, 2007. Members in attendance were John Chrzas ( University of Georgia), Ashley Deacon (Chairman, Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory), Alfonso Mondragon ( Northwestern University), and Janet Smith (University of Michigan Medical School). Absent was Keith Hodgson (Stanford Synchrotron). Representing NCRR at this meeting was Amy Swain, Program Director. The following picture shows Steve Ealick presenting an overview of NE- CAT’s activities to the committee.

     

     

     

     

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