At the left, members of the Experiments division at the Control hutch of NOTOS. At the right, part of the team involved in the NOTOS commissioning. The monitor screen shows a red line that represents the beam reflected by the first mirror illuminating a phosphorus wall placed after the primary slits.
Cerdanyola del Vallès, 16th February 2021. Opening a beamline front-end to synchrotron light is an exciting moment and a crucial test for all the previous job done by many persons during months.
The atmosphere at the NOTOS control hutch last Friday 12th of February 2021, when the commissioning of the beamline started, was calm even if reflecting the tension of the moment. All the beamline components included in this test were responding as expected when receiving the first photons from the accelerators.
At 12:15 h the front-end was opened and the direct beam was clearly visible in the control monitor and then the cylindrical mirror was aligned to receive the first sign of synchrotron radiation. The initial current of the storage ring was very low (1 mA) allowing the alignment of the other opto-mechanical components minimizing the risk of damage of instrumentation. Increasing the current in the storage beam up to 50 mA, no unexpected behavior was observed monitoring temperature and pressure. Then in 4 hours, the beamline reached the nominal value of 250 mA demonstrating the high quality of the commissioning preparation. Similar procedure was applied the following day, 13th of February, irradiating the mirror in the region with Rh coating to complete its X-ray conditioning.
The members of the beamline (Experiments division) were driving the commissioning aligning the instrumentation and starting the characterization of the beamline with the assistance of the beamline engineer from the Transversal section (Engineering division). The engineers from the Controls section (Computing division) were monitoring that EPS and control systems and the members of the Radioprotection group of the Health and Safety Office were measuring the radiation levels at different areas of the beamline to check the effectiveness of the shielding.
Except for the double crystal monochromator, all the opto-mechanical components in the optical station and some elements of the experimental station, among which a two-circles diffractometer equipped with Multi-channel analyzer, came from BM25-A, one of the two beamlines that the Spanish government built at the end of the 90s in the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble. In 2017, the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) decided to move one of the branches to the Spanish facility while the other branch remains in Grenoble.
The NOTOS beamline will be hosting official users from June 2021 to carry X-ray absorption and X-ray diffraction experiments, with countless applications in the fields of chemistry, catalysis and materials science. NOTOS is now open for the submission of proposals for the call 2021-II. In the beamline webpage the available techniques are summarized.
At the left, the scientific team of the beamline. At the right, inside the Optical hutch.
This project is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) within the Spanish Pluri-Regional Operative Programme (former Smart Growth Operative Programme) 2014-2020.
