Ariel Gomez

The design, performance, and capabilities of the High Energy beamline at the Brockhouse Sector of the Canadian Light Source are described. The beamline uses a single bent silicon wafer as a side-bounce Laue monochromator, using the (111), (422), or (533) hkl reflections to access energies ranging from 25 to 90 keV. The cryogenically cooled crystal serves as the only optical element in the beamline providing a simple, convenient, and reliable configuration. The bending provides a vertical focus as small as 20 µm. The flux ranges from 1 × 10¹⁰ to 1 × 10¹³ photons s⁻¹, depending on the energy, with typical pre-monochromator slit settings. A large translation table in the hutch moves to follow the beam as the energy is changed. Data are collected using large area detectors. Common uses include rapid collection of powder diffraction data, penetration of thick samples and devices, high pressure diffraction, and pair distribution function measurements.

A new diffraction beamline for materials science has been built at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron. The X-ray source is an in-vacuum wiggler with a 2.5 T peak magnetic field at 5.2 mm gap. The optical configuration includes a toroidal mirror, a single side-bounce Bragg monochromator, and a cylindrical mirror, producing a sub-150 µm vertical × 500 µm horizontal focused beam with a photon energy range of 7–22 keV and a flux of 10¹² photons per second at the sample position. Three endstations are currently open to general users, and the techniques available include high-resolution powder diffraction, small molecule crystallography, X-ray reflectivity, in situ rapid thermal annealing, and SAXS/WAXS. The beamline design parameters, calculated and measured performance, and initial experimental results are presented to demonstrate the capabilities for materials science.