The overall requirement of the Upgrade to routinely handle nano-focused beams and nano-sized samples implies many challenges for X-ray optics and detection, sample preparation and manipulation, precision mechanics, and electronics.

Sample environments

Materials in every-day life are often at high temperatures and/or pressures, and novel materials synthesised at extreme conditions. One of the engineering goals for the Upgrade is making available advanced sample environments with extreme conditions on the beamlines whilst fitting in the tight space around the sample also detectors and monitoring equipment.

The objectives for “extreme conditions” include:

• Pressures up to 1 Mbar, along with lower kilobar pressures at wide opening angles for improved X-ray optical access
• High temperatures above 3000°C
• Low temperatures below 1 K
• High magnetic fields up to 50 T in pulsed mode and 30 T in continuous mode

Detectors

Experiments at the ESRF (and elsewhere) are often restricted by the limitations of today’s X-ray detectors resulting in significant “waste” of incoming photons and/or loss of information about the sample. Today’s "detector handicap" will be overcome with new developments in six key areas targeted in the Upgrade:

• High-sensitivity large-area detectors
• High efficiency sensors especially for high-energy X-rays
• Fast imaging cameras notably in the sub-millisecond range along with large detection areas
• Time-resolved hybrid pixel counting detectors with nanosecond resolution and 2D recording
• Pixel detectors with extended dynamic range
• Energy dispersive 2D detectors

Many of these new engineering and detector technologies will be developed in collaboration with other light sources and institutes in Europe.

Computing

The Upgrade will make the entire process of data collection more effective and efficient, from instrument control, data interpretation, modelling, presentation, to data transfer and archiving.

New on-line software linked together by a framework will allow data analysis whilst an experiment is running to provide feedback on the quality of the samples and the experimental strategy.

New off-line software will handle the simulations of nanofocusing ray tracing and data interpretation and experiment protocols. Users will generally be able to export data analysis software to run on computers in their home institutes.

Adopting data formats conforming to mutually agreed standards will make possible to generate metadata helping with automatic data analysis. Standards will also make collaborative efforts for data analysis, storage and dissemination more effective.

PyMca screenshot showing some of the visualisation techniques for fluorescence maps collected at beamline ID21. PyMca includes powerful visualisation techniques for 1D to 3D data for spectroscopic data analysis. This tool is a reference in the field today and it is used at many ESRF beamlines and at other institutions such as SSRL, CHESS, LLNL, SOLEIL, PSI, ANKA and DIAMOND.

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