Small Angle X-ray Scattering

Small Angle X-ray Scattering has become a well known standard method to study the structure of various objects in the spatial range from 1 to 1000 nm, and therefore instruments capable to perform such experiments are installed at most of the synchrotron research centers. The high-flux SAXS beamline at ELETTRA is mainly intended for time-resolved studies on fast structural transitions in the sub-millisecond time region in solutions and partly ordered systems with a SAXS-resolution of 1 to 140 nm in real-space.

The photon source is the 57-pole wiggler whose beam is shared and used simultaneously with a Macromolecular Crystallography beamline. From the very intense wiggler radiation, the SAXS-Beamline accepts 3 discrete energies, namely 5.4, 8 and 16 keV (0.077, 0.154, 0.23 nm). The beamline optics consists of a flat, asymmetric-cut double crystal monochromator and a double focusing toroidal mirror.

Areas of research

• Time-Resolved Studies >= 11 µs
• Low Contrast Solution Scattering
• Grazing Incidence Surface Diffraction
• Micro-Spot Scanning
• X-ray Fluorescence Analysis
• Simultaneously Performed Small- and Wide-Angle Measurements (SWAXS) on:
  • Gels
  • Liquid Crystals
  • (Bio) Polymers
  • Amorphous Materials
  • Muscles

On-line data analysis

The SAXS beamline represents a complex data collection process, with specific processing, storage, anaysis and sharing and visualisation requirements. This kind of application requires both the support of a standard Grid computing environment, that is a virtual organisation, a set of distributed storage and computing resources and some resource brokering mechanism, a workflow definition and execution environment and the capability to integrate instruments (the detectors) and interactively collaborate in the data analysis process.