I22: SAXS/WAXS beamline at Diamond Light Source – an overview of 10 years operation

Abstract

Beamline I22 at Diamond Light Source is dedicated to the study of soft-matter systems from both biological and materials science. The beamline can operate in the range 3.7 keV to 22 keV for transmission SAXS and 14 keV to 20 keV for microfocus SAXS with beam sizes of 240 µm × 60 µm [full width half-maximum (FWHM) horizontal (H) × vertical (V)] at the sample for the main beamline, and approximately 10 µm × 10 µm for the dedicated microfocusing platform. There is a versatile sample platform for accommodating a range of facilities and user-developed sample environments. The high brilliance of the insertion device source on I22 allows structural investigation of materials under extreme environments (for example, fluid flow at high pressures and temperatures). I22 provides reliable access to millisecond data acquisition timescales, essential to understanding kinetic processes such as protein folding or structural evolution in polymers and colloids.

Investigating the Fibrillar Ultrastructure and Mechanics in Keloid Scars Using In Situ Synchrotron X-ray Nanomechanical Imaging

“…A Pilatus 2M detector with a pixel size of 172 μm and a resolution of 1475 × 1679 pixels was used to collect SAXD data at beamline I22, Diamond Light Source, Harwell Science Campus, Didcot, UK [ 36 ]. Before SAXD scanning, the sample-to-detector distance and beam center were elucidated using a silver behenate calibrant; the sample-to-detector distance was calculated to be 5.5 m. Each SAXS measurement was for 1 s, with an X-ray energy of 14 keV and a beam size of ~15 μm.…”

Extending synchrotron SAXS instrument ranges through addition of a portable, inexpensive USAXS module with vertical rotation axes

“…X-ray data were collected at the I22 beamline at Diamond Light Source, UK, configured for this experiment to use 18.0 keV photons (Smith et al, 2021). The SAXS detector was positioned at a distance of 9.40 m from the sample as calibrated using a 100 nm-period Si 3 N 4 grating (Silson, UK), giving a usable range of 0.02 q (nm À1 ) 2.5.…”

“…The rocking curve of the upstream crystal is a convolution of the crystal rocking curve and the divergence inherent in the incident beam. This incident beam is in its standard SAXS configuration, monochromated with a Si(111) double-crystal monochromator and focused on the beamstop (Smith et al, 2021). The rocking curve of the downstream crystal, however, matches the divergence of the beam emerging from the upstream crystal.…”

“…Small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) benefits from expanded measurement ranges, both towards wide angle as well as very small angles. With current laboratory and synchrotron SAXS instruments now able to measure up to four decades in scattering vector q 1 -thus probing up to four decades in structural details for a given material -insights are gained not of individual structural components in isolation but of the complete hierarchical interplay of structures (Narayanan et al, 2018;Smith et al, 2021;Smales & Pauw, 2021;Allen et al, 2008). This allows for much more comprehensive structure-property relationships to be established, and correlations between the atomic arrangement and the nanostructure can be evaluated on a consistent dataset.…”

Data Mining of Polymer Phase Transitions upon Temperature Changes by Small and Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering Combined with Raman Spectroscopy

“…At present, there is a significant number of multi-purpose synchrotron radiation SAXS/WAXS beamlines, in which a plethora of materials science experiments in combination with sophisticated sample environments can be carried out to monitor the nanostructure development upon external stimuli [ 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ].…”