Performance of the High-Throughput Protein Crystallography Beamline BL13B1 at the NSRRC

Abstract

A high-throughput Protein Crystallography beamline BL13B1 was constructed on a high-field (3.2 T) superconducting magnet, multi-pole (28 effective poles) wiggler (SW6) fan of the NSRRC storage ring. This field increase the critical energy from 2.14 keV for a 1.25 T normal conducting magnet to 4.82 keV. The 28 poles device, of period 60 mm, is capable to provide an intense X-ray beam up to 19 keV that allows a hard x-ray program to be developed on the relatively low energy National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center (NSRRC) ring (1.5 GeV). BL13B1 operates over the energy range from 6.5 keV to 19 keV (1.92 angstrom to 0.65 angstrom). Optimized for MAD experiments, it is also suitable for monochromatic crystallography. The principal components of the beamline include a front end, vertically collimating premirror, double-crystal silicon (111) monochromator with a fixed-height exit beam, and a toroidal focusing mirror. The end station is equipped with a state-of-the-art ADSC Quantum315 CCD area detector, a high precision single-phi axis goniometer, a sample cooling system (-100 K), a robotic sample changer for automatically sample mounting and centering, user-friendly data acquisition software (BLU-ICE), and powerful data processing software (HKL2000). The design and performance characteristics of this beamline will be described.