The impressive progress in the performance of synchrotron radiation sources is nowadays driven by the so-called `ultimate storage ring' projects which promise an unprecedented improvement in brightness. Progress on the detector side has not always been at the same pace, especially as far as soft X-ray 2D detectors are concerned. While the most commonly used detectors are still based on microchannel plates or CCD technology, recent developments of CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor)-type detectors will play an ever more important role as 2D detectors in the soft X-ray range. This paper describes the capabilities and performance of a camera equipped with a newly commercialized backside-illuminated scientific CMOS (sCMOS-BSI) sensor, integrated in a vacuum environment, for soft X-ray experiments at synchrotron sources. The 4 Mpixel sensor reaches a frame rate of up to 48 frames s−1 while matching the requirements for X-ray experiments in terms of high-intensity linearity (>98%), good spatial homogeneity (<1%), high charge capacity (up to 80 ke−), and low readout noise (down to 2 e− r.m.s.) and dark current (3 e− per second per pixel). Performance evaluations in the soft X-ray range have been carried out at the METROLOGIE beamline of the SOLEIL synchrotron. The quantum efficiency, spatial resolution (24 line-pairs mm−1), energy resolution (<100 eV) and radiation damage versus the X-ray dose (<600 Gy) have been measured in the energy range from 40 to 2000 eV. In order to illustrate the capabilities of this new sCMOS-BSI sensor, several experiments have been performed at the SEXTANTS and HERMES soft X-ray beamlines of the SOLEIL synchrotron: acquisition of a coherent diffraction pattern from a pinhole at 186 eV, a scattering experiment from a nanostructured Co/Cu multilayer at 767 eV and ptychographic imaging in transmission at 706 eV.
A commercial scientific camera has been adapted and characterized at the SOLEIL Synchrotron with the aim to improve the acquisition capabilities on the soft X-ray coherent scattering experimental station at SEXTANTS beamline. This device is equipped by the last generation of back side illuminated scientific CMOS (BSI-sCMOS) of 2048 by 2048 pixels of 11 m² able to acquire low noise images with a frame rate up to 48 Hz. The camera's performance measurements have been done and shows a good level of readout noise, a large full-well capacity, a medium dark current and a good homogeneity, respectively, 1.6 e-rms (in High Gain mode), 80 000 e-(in Low Gain mode), < 5 e-/pixel/s and ~ 1%. The quantum efficiency (QE) measurement has been performed at the soft x-ray branch of the METROLOGIE beamline and gives a relatively good agreement with the expected theoretical values. Finally, the demonstration of the camera's efficiency and of the gain in useful time measurement related to the high frame rate have been performed with a series of Airy patterns images compared with an image recorded using the standard BSI-CDD already in operation at the SEXTANTS beamline.
Ultraviolet (UV) synchrotron radiation circular dichroism (SRCD) spectroscopy has made an important contribution to the determination and understanding of the structure of bio-molecules. In this paper, we report an innovative approach that we term time-resolved SRCD (tr-SRCD), which overcomes the limitations of current broadband UV SRCD setups. This technique allows accessing ultrafast time scales (down to nanoseconds), previously measurable only by other methods, such as infrared (IR), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), fluorescence and absorbance spectroscopies, and small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS). The tr-SRCD setup takes advantage of the natural polarization of the synchrotron radiation emitted by a bending magnet to record broadband UV CD faster than any current SRCD setup, improving the acquisition speed from 10 mHz to 130 Hz and the accessible temporal resolution by several orders of magnitude. We illustrate the new approach by following the isomer concentration changes of an azopeptide after a photoisomerization. This breakthrough in SRCD spectroscopy opens up a wide range of potential applications to the detailed characterization of biological processes, such as protein folding and protein-ligand binding.
The XPAD3S-CdTe, a CdTe photon-counting pixel array detector, has been used to measure the energy and the intensity of the white-beam diffraction from a lysozyme crystal. A method was developed to calibrate the detector in terms of energy, allowing incident photon energy measurement to high resolution (approximately 140 eV), opening up new possibilities in energy-resolved X-ray diffraction. In order to demonstrate this, Laue diffraction experiments were performed on the bending-magnet beamline METROLOGIE at Synchrotron SOLEIL. The X-ray energy spectra of diffracted spots were deduced from the indexed Laue patterns collected with an imaging-plate detector and then measured with both the XPAD3S-CdTe and the XPAD3S-Si, a silicon photon-counting pixel array detector. The predicted and measured energy of selected diffraction spots are in good agreement, demonstrating the reliability of the calibration method. These results open up the way to direct unit-cell parameter determination and the measurement of high-quality Laue data even at low resolution. Based on the success of these measurements, potential applications in X-ray diffraction opened up by this type of technology are discussed.
The new ANATOMIX beamline at Synchrotron SOLEIL is dedicated to hard X-ray full-field tomography techniques. Operating in a range of photon energies from approximately 5 to 50 keV, it offers both parallel-beam projection microtomography and nanotomography using a zone-plate transmission X-ray microscope and thus covers a range of spatial resolution from 20 nm to 20 µm, expressed in terms of useful pixel size. Here we describe the microtomography instrumentation and its performance.
The ANATOMIX beamline at Synchrotron SOLEIL, operational since 2018, is dedicated to hard X-ray full-field tomography techniques. Operating in a range of photon energies from approximately 5 to 50 keV, it offers both parallel-beam projection microtomography, in absorption and phase contrast, and nanotomography using a zone-plate transmission X-ray microscope. With these methods, the beamline covers a range of spatial resolution from 20 nm to 20 µm, expressed in terms of useful pixel size. The variable beam size of up to 40 mm allows users to image large objects. Here we describe the microtomography instrumentation of the beamline.
<a> </a><p><a></a><a>Ultraviolet (UV) synchrotron radiation circular dichroism (SRCD) spectroscopy has made an important contribution to the determination and understanding of the structure of bio-molecules. In this paper, we report an innovative</a> approach that we term time-resolved SRCD (tr-SRCD), which overcomes the limitations of current broadband UV SRCD setups. This technique allows accessing ultrafast time scales (down to nanoseconds), previously measurable only by other methods, such as infrared (IR), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), fluorescence and absorbance spectroscopies and small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS). The tr-SRCD setup takes advantage of the natural polarisation of the synchrotron radiation emitted by a bending magnet to record broadband UV CD faster than any current SRCD setup, improving the acquisition speed from 10 mHz to 130 Hz and the accessible temporal resolution by several orders of magnitude. We illustrate the new approach by following the isomers concentration changes of an azopeptide after a photoisomerisation. This breakthrough in SRCD spectroscopy opens up a wide range of potential applications to the detailed characterisation of biological processes, such as protein folding, protein-ligand binding.<a></a></p>
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