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ESRF expertise to benefit European XFEL

18-02-2016

The ESRF and European XFEL have joined forces in a technologically demanding project to design the end station for an instrument dedicated to materials imaging and dynamics (MID) at the European XFEL in Hamburg, Germany.

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The project, which involves the supply by the ESRF of engineering assistance for the study and design of a unique instrument for materials imaging and dynamics, as well as knowledge transfer and training, started in 2012 and has reached the construction stage with the award, in January 2016, of a contract to the main supplier. The MID experimental station will be installed at the SASE2 undulator beamline of the European XFEL. The MID station will enable scientists to perform imaging and dynamics experiments using X-ray laser beams of unprecedented brightness, starting from 2017.

Bright lights unite for X-ray excellence

When Anders Madsen, scientist in charge of the Materials and Imaging Dynamics (MID) group, started work on the conceptual design of the end station, he immediately turned to the ESRF as an obvious choice for the technological know-how and engineering to meet the challenges set by the science goals. Having spent twelve years on the ESRF’s ID10 beamline and working in close collaboration with Muriel Magnin-Mattenet, a senior engineer and expert in synchrotron radiation instrumentation, he knew the ESRF’s experience and expertise would be a valuable asset for his project.

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The ESRF technical review committee. From left to right: M. Renier, D. Dallé, M. Magnin-Mattenet, Y. Dabin, F. Cianciosi, H. Pedroso-Marquès. Absent from photo:  L. Ducotté, T. Mairs, P. Marion.

Under the initiative of Jean Susini, then head of the ESRF’s Instrumentation Services and Development division, and Ed Mitchell, head of the Business Development Office, first contacts were made with European XFEL in 2012 to set up a collaboration contract with the ESRF.

“We first discussed the project during the Synchrotron Radiation Instrumentation conference, organised by the ESRF and Soleil in Lyon in 2012”, says Anders Madsen. “Muriel was my immediate choice as engineering contact at ESRF. I needed someone who had the expertise to ‘kick-start’ the technical design of this complicated instrument together with my team.”As well as developing the instrumentation for the experimental station, Anders also needed to put together the team of scientists, engineers and technicians at a time when European XFEL was still in the early stages of hiring people and construction. He had just asked Gabriele Ansaldi to join the team. A talented engineer with a solid experience from industry, Gabriele had no previous experience of synchrotron radiation instrumentation nor of working in a scientific environment. He needed a tutor who could give him a flying start into the unknown world of X-ray instrumentation and precision engineering.  Muriel was again an obvious choice having spent 24 years in a scientific and technical environment, often translating seemingly far-fetched concepts into world-class precision instrumentation.

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Anders Madsen (right) and Gabriele Ansaldi (second from right) with the MID team inside the European XFEL experimental hall, at the location of the future MID station. Credit: European XFEL.

For the ESRF, the instrument conceived by Anders Madsen presented a huge technological challenge.

So why exactly was the instrument such a challenge to design?

Stability and precision are the key terms. How challenging is it to move and position, to within a few dozen microns, an instrument that weighs several tons, and a 500 kg detector connected to the sample chamber via a 500 mm diameter flange which implies a vacuum force equivalent to several tons? Then move it again, and again, with the same precision? 

The technology and craftsmanship used at the ESRF, for example on beamlines ID32 and ID01, were essential to overcome this challenge. The floor of the MID experimental station is made of very high quality and highly polished Italian rock, especially machined by a Grenoble craftsman named Giovanni Pilloni. His work is so unique that he was called from Grenoble to Hamburg for the floor of the MID station. The detector for the MID instrument is developed by a consortium headed by the DESY photon science detector group and offers the genuine feature of taking pictures with 1 million pixels at a rate of 4.5 MHz, synchronised to the time structure of the European XFEL. The detector is supported by a granite block which ensures stability during movement, and is displaced thanks to air pads that slide smoothly over the stone floor.

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Result of the collaboration between ESRF and XFEL: 3D drawing of the differential pumping, the sample environment and  the detector in a WAXS  position inside the MID experimental hutch. Copyright ESRF-XFEL

Another challenge to be surmounted is related to the three different configurations proposed by the MID end station: small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS), wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS) and a large field-of-view configuration featuring a short distance (cm) between the sample and the detector.

A manual re-configuration is required to change between experimental set-ups for SAXS and WAXS. This manoeuvre has to be carried out very rapidly as time spent in this operation is counted in number of precious hours of beam time not used. The conception of the equipment had to be optimised for rapidity and precision and can be likened to a Formula One pit-stop.

As if that wasn’t enough, inside both the SAXS and WAXS configurations, the detector, which is connected to an accordion telescopic bellow under vacuum, can be positioned at a distance between 3m and 8m from the sample chamber.

The vacuum environment of the instrument proved challenging throughout the design, notably due to the definition of the differential pumping chambers which enable the transition between the high-level vacuum region of the optical instruments and the higher pressure in sample environment which corresponds to a pressure change from 10-8 mbar to 10-1 mbar.

For Hugo Pedroso Marques, vacuum engineer at the ESRF and member of the technical review committee, the basis for an instrument of this type is actually quite simple if the passage for the vacuum is quite small and if the vacuum chamber is long in length. “In this case, the conceptual report asked us to do the complete opposite to what makes differential pumping straight-forward, meaning the vacuum chamber has a wide opening of 40x4mm and is short at only 1m long!

The project started out as highly ambitious and has remained so throughout the conceptual and technical design phases, for a major part thanks to the solid back-up provided by the ESRF’s engineering teams.

Both institutes gave their full to bring the project to fruition. Lively conference calls and regular email and phone exchanges over the technical details were a daily feature for the teams. As European XFEL is responsible for the mechanical design and the overall integration into the European XFEL infrastructure, the instrument engineer of MID, Gabriele Ansaldi, spent several weeks at ESRF working together with the team.

The completion of the project was only possible thanks to the long-standing expertise and experience of the ESRF, the pooling of professional know-how as well as good communication with European XFEL,” says Muriel Magnin-Mattenet, project leader. “Nine people from the ESRF worked on the project throughout the design phase as part of the technical review committee, accompanied by an external drafting office, IRPI, from the Grenoble region.”

An excellent return on investment

Confident to have obtained the best possible design for this instrument, Anders is convinced that the choice of the ESRF as engineers will represent a 2-3 fold return on the investment. “The ESRF delivered such a complete and detailed set of drawings valid for manufacturing that the manufacturer will be able to start cutting metal almost on day 1, saving us thousands in engineering and production costs.”

At the moment, only the high tech stone floor on which the pivoting detector arm will slide indicates the place where the experimental hutch of the MID station will soon be erected. With construction of the end station about to begin, Anders expects the site acceptance tests to be completed in a little more than one year from now, followed by commissioning of the instrument and first users on the station late 2017 or early 2018.

Several X-ray scattering techniques will be offered at MID taking advantage of the coherence, flux, and ultrashort duration of the X-ray pulses. In addition, the MID station will feature a powerful tuneable and synchronized optical laser system. MID will offer setups for X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS), coherent X-ray diffraction imaging (CXDI), high resolution scattering, and ultrafast pump–probe experiments in an energy range from approximately 5 to 25 keV, with a later option for moving to higher energies.

More about European XFEL

The European XFEL is currently under construction in Hamburg, Germany, with first users scheduled in 2017. The facility will generate ultrashort and unique X-ray flashes 27 000 times per second and with a brilliance that is a billion times higher than that of the best conventional X-ray radiation sources.

The European XFEL will complement the ESRF in opening up complete new fields of research, providing scientists with the opportunity to study samples at time scales in the femto-second, to obtain new insights in the structure of biomolecules and other biological entities as well as to examine extreme states such as occurring inside planets. With a highly coherent X-ray laser beam in a wavelength ranging from 0.05 to 4.7 nanometres, many different types of samples can be observed in atomic resolution and atomic-scale dynamics filmed with 3D resolution.

More about the ESRF

The ESRF’s Instrumentation Services and Development Division is a critical component in the delivery of the very best in light source instrumentation. With over 20 years of know-how, the ESRF’s ISDD has a pool of expertise unique worldwide. The expertise covers technologies from detectors, optics, precision mechanics, and vacuum, to advanced control and software systems, as well as sophisticated simulation and modelling. As part of the ESRF’s mission, this know-how is shared with other light sources, institutes and industry instrument suppliers in the ESRF’s member states and further afield.

For further information on our knowledge and technology transfer services

Dr Edward Mitchell
+33 (0)4 76 88 26 64

Dr Muriel Magnin-Mattenet
+33 (0)4 76 88 24 44

 

 

Top image: Working together for advanced instrumentation. Credit: ESRF/I. Ginzburg