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

     

    August 2006  

    24-ID Phase 1 Beam Line User Operations

    The APS 2006-2 run cycle, June through August, concluded August 25. During that period, the Phase 1 beam line was heavily utilized by NE-CAT’s institutional users. More than 29 groups used the beam line to screen nearly two thousand crystals and collect more than 430 complete data sets. During this entire period the beam line ran very well with virtually no outages due to problems with the beam line itself. The only minor problems encountered by users, of the order of hours and not days, were problems encountered with the accelerator itself. In one incident, loss of injection resulted in decay of the stored beam over a period of a day but the users were still able to take data. Also, several hours of instabilities in beam position were experienced during start up after scheduled one and two day APS maintenance periods requiring users to check and readjust the beam position before taking data until the ring and optics attained equilibrium. All users reported in their “End-of-Run Summary Forms” that they were successful and pleased with the entire beam line operations. The accelerator is now down during the month of September for scheduled preventative maintenance. Starting with resumption of APS operations on October 3, for the 2006-3 run, 25% of the beam time on Phase 1 will be devoted to APS General Users. Institutional and NE-CAT program users will not suffer loss of the full 25% of beam time allocated to General Users since the sizable amount of internal development time allocated during the 2006-2 run for installation and testing of the Phase 2 monochromator will not be needed during this run.

    The disk storage space allocated to GPFS has been nearly doubled from 8.5 TB to 15 TB to accommodate user needs and maintain the policy that user data will remain available on the data storage system for at least 30 days. During the shut down in September, the monochromator second crystal will be remounted. During 2006-2 operations, it was noted that the temperature of the second crystal was continually increasing due to changes in the heat conductivity between the crystal and its cooling block, presumably due to changes at the interface layer. A new crystal cooling block has been designed, is now being fabricated, and will be installed during the current shutdown to re-establish good solid thermal conductivity.

     

    24-ID Phase 2 Fixed-Energy Beam Line Installation

    During August, testing and calibration of the beam line optics took place. The results of the optical testing were “much better than expected at this early period of commissioning”. The optics functioned very well and reliably, beam at the sample position was very well focused, and within the limitations of the measurements no vertical instabilities were observed due to floor vibrations or liquid nitrogen cooling flow.

    Testing of the monochromator itself continues to remain limited due to several problems with the nanomotors and a picomotor supplied by the vendor as well as fundamental design problems. The vendor has committed to supplying a completely re-designed crystal roll cage. Unfortunately, the vendor could not meet the original installation date during the September accelerator shutdown period due to delays incurred in component deliveries from its suppliers. Installation is now scheduled for the January APS maintenance shutdown period. However, we believe that we will be able to schedule some institutional users during the 2006-3 run on the Phase 2 beam line to aid in crystallographic commissioning of the beam line and, therefore, not incur any significant delay in the schedule for completion of the beam line.

     
     

    © 2005 Northeastern Collaborative Access Team

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