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

     

    February 2007  

     

    24-ID Phase 1 Beam Line User Operations

    After more than a month of scheduled accelerator shut down for maintenance, beam line operations resumed on January 30. Throughout the entire month of February, the beam line was in nearly continuous use by institutional members and APS General Users with some time devoted early in the schedule for beam tuning due to the long shutdown. Once again, the beam line operated at a high degree of reliability and all users reported successful experiments.

    As an aid to users, the Harvard suite of SBGrid software has been loaded onto the analysis workstations.

    More of our users are requesting runs at higher energies, e.g., the bromine edge. During some early experiments it was noted that there was some x-ray transmission at these higher energies through the rotary shutter which is constructed of aluminum. To eliminate this leakage at the higher energies, the current aluminum rotary shutter will be replace with one fabricated from tungsten.

    The HP-EVA 5000 data storage unit has been moved from the experimental floor into a nearby engineering laboratory. This move was necessitated in order to protect the data storage unit from the serious dust environment existing on the experimental floor.

    An increasing number of our users are requesting the availability of a sample placement robotics system to speed up screening of crystals. We are now planning to shortly relocate the existing ALS-type sample robotics system from the 8-BM beam line to one of the ID beam lines.

     

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

    Commissioning of the new fixed-energy insertion-device beam line is progressing well. Much of the effort in February was devoted to optimizing the beam position stability. A scatter guard was installed to protect the downstream beam position monitor (bpm) from back scattered radiation from the attenuator foils. The real-time beam stability feed back system based upon using the bpm was then installed and successfully tested. An optimum flow rate of liquid nitrogen was established to minimize vibrations of the crystal. All of these developments resulted in very good position stability of the beam on sample to within a few microns over an extended period of time. Installation of the data acquisition and analysis computers then brought the entire beam line to full readiness for crystallographic commissioning. The first full data sets were taken on February 16. In addition to using standard crystals to test the quality of data that could be obtained, the resident staff took data using a crystal that was previous studied at 24-ID-C. The quality of the data taken with the crystals and the independent solution of the structure of the previously used crystal demonstrated that the quality of data taken at 24-ID-E, even at this early stage, was quite comparable to that taken at the mature 24-ID-C beam line. The beam line is now ready to be fully tested for data quality by user groups from Cornell and Harvard scheduled for early March.

     

    Installation of the MD2 Microdiffractometer

     The adjustable support and alignment stand for the MD2 is nearly completed. A delay was incurred because the CAD drawings received for ACCEL/Maatel did not represent the base plate “as built”. Therefore, some additional machining of the top plate of the support stand is required.

    We have received from Maatel the software for the EPICS channel access gateway developed at the Swiss Light Source. Availability of this software will greatly simplify interfacing the MD2 software with the NE-CAT Console operating system.

    We are currently attempting to arrange for Maatel engineers to visit the NE-CAT beam line early in April to aid in the setup and testing of the MD2 with x-rays at the 24-ID-E beam line.

     

    Sample Placement Robotics System Collaboration

    As a start of the collaborative program between LBNL/ALS and NE-CAT in sample placement robotics, Carl Cork from ALS visited with the NE-CAT staff this month. Carl initially described the new “gantry-type” robotics system under development at ALS. An agreement was reached to test the first prototype on one of NE-CAT’s beam lines in the fall of 2007 in addition to discussing possible enhancements to the prototype.

     
     

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