SAXS (Small Angle X-ray Scattering) Underway

Paolo (postdoc at CSIRO) and I are about 4 and a half hours into our night shift at the SAXS/ WAXS beamline at the Australian Synchrotron. We had some trouble getting the equipment set up earlier this evening because the stage control motors went into a safety shutdown mode. This is not obvious from the control system (screens shown in the photo). The control system is quite complicated. In the photo, you can see several camera shots showing us what is physically going on in the chamber as well as several screens with instrument readouts and safety monitoring information. We are currently running some background samples trying to see whether temperature will affect our background scattering pattern. This will be important since we will be monitoring the thermal rearrangement (at elevated temperatures) of some of the polyimide 'TR' polymers that are being looked at for applications in gas separation membranes. Also in the photo, you can see that I tried to be 'in the spirit' by wearing my 'Effusive Beams' IM soccer shirt (it's a nerdy team name, but the shirts look good!).

The whole system is incredibly complicated. We are working in the control station right next to the beamline (the beamline itself is enclosed in essentially a lead box). The procedure for turning the beam on is pretty intense. There are a series of buttons to be pushed in order to secure the beamline chamber and close the door. Once these have been activated, the giant lead door has to be shut and locked. When we open the shutter to introduce the beam into the chamber (to start collecting data), everything in the chamber is flooded with high intensity x-ray radiation. The photo to the right shows the main safety system panel. This displays the status of the chamber. The blue indicators on the top say that both chambers have been secured and the red indicators tell us that radiation is present in the chambers. The green indicators at the bottom tell us that the safety override systems are functioning normally. You can also see two keys that need to be in place before the chamber can be secured. The safety checks and cross-checks are pretty extensive. The keys, in particular, make me think of the scenes that are often shown in military drama movies involving nuclear missile launches.

The whole facility is pretty impressive. I managed to get a few photos of the beamline from inside the chamber (between samples). Here is what the system looks like from the inside. The connection to the main loop (this is where the x-rays enter the chamber. They are then focused down a tube toward the sample. The detector (being held up by a purple harness) picks up the scattering data as the experiment progresses.