World-class beamline portfolio

The first phase of the Upgrade includes the development of eight completely new beamlines along with refurbishment of many existing ones. Under the second phase of the Upgrade, up to six more new beamlines and refurbishment of the remainder of the existing beamlines are planned.

The “Purple Book” of October 2007 mapped out the science case for the Upgrade Programme and listed ideas for over 40 new beamlines at the ESRF. In May 2008, the Science Advisory Committee (SAC) of the ESRF selected eleven candidate beamlines from this list for further study within Phase 1 of the Upgrade. Brainstorming sessions with external experts and users served to hone the science cases and explore the technological limits of the candidate beamlines. A Conceptual Design Report for each candidate beamline enabled the SAC, in November 2008 and May 2009, to select eight new beamlines for the first phase of the Upgrade.

Conceptual design reports for the upgrade beamlines of phase 1

In parallel, a large-scale exercise was undertaken to establish how the entire portfolio of ESRF beamlines will develop over the first phase of the Upgrade, and where beamlines must be refurbished, benefitting from new technologies developed as part of the Upgrade. For each existing beamline at the ESRF, a Conceptual Design Report (CDR) was established in the course of 2009, describing the science case and future development of the beamline.

The 30 CDRs of both existing and new beamlines were endorsed by the SAC at its meeting in May 2009 and the core of these documents can be accessed using the links below.

Conceptual design reports for the ESRF beamline portfolio

• Dynamics and extreme conditions
• Electronic structure and magnetism
• Structural biology
• Structure of materials
• Structure of soft matter
• X-ray imaging
• Instrumentation services and development
  

Beamline floor plan

Already in 2008, a new ESRF beamline floor plan was established identifying the locations of the new beamlines along with removals of existing beamlines where necessary. The new floor plan also clusters beamlines linked by science or support facilities when this is beneficial and feasible.  This plan will be published once finalised and endorsed by the SAC.

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Performance improvement for the ESRF beam line portfolio

This paragraph aims at illustrating how the aforementioned floor plan facilitates the enhancement of the performance of the ESRF’s public beamlines during the Upgrade Programme.

In an effort to quantify the effect of the Upgrade Programme on the overall performance of the ESRF, several indicators have been identified to quantify the performance of the principal components of each beamline:

• Source properties
• Beam properties at sample position
• Beamline length
• Detector system
• Automation and throughput
• (Sample environment)

For these principal beamline components, quantitative numbers for the improvement of the performance during the Upgrade were established for all beamlines in order to calculate the overall improvement of the performance of ESRF’s public beamlines during the Upgrade. Depending on their nature, the performance improvement of principal components contributes to the overall performance of a beamline either in an additive or in a multiplicative manner. It is evident that it is impossible to define quantitative numbers on the improvement of a beamline’s sample environment, therefore information of sample environment was collected, but excluded from the calculation of the overall performance factors.

The following table lists, for each upgraded or refurbished ESRF beamline, its capacity (in terms of a full beamline equivalent) before and after the Upgrade and the overall performance improvement factors.

It is very important to note that the figures obtained denote the peak performance of a beamline, achievable only by experiments well adapted to the beamline, i.e. experiments that make optimal use of the beamline’s characteristics. For instance, the overall performance factor does not imply that the number of photons emitted by the source or the number of experiments carried out per year is increasing by the corresponding factor. A performance increase by a factor of 10,000 might, for instance, derive from the possibility to perform the same experiment on a 100x smaller sample, 10x faster, and with 10x higher data quality, thus implying that experiments, which are currently not feasible, will become possible after the Upgrade.

It is noteworthy that the ESRF’s peak performance, measured over all ESRF public beamlines, will increase by a factor of 3900. Calculation of this factor for the UPBL projects only yields a value of 6420.

Next page: Accelerator and X-ray source improvements