A pEek on the lab

the university of liverpool (uk)

Contacts: Paul THOMPSON, pthompso@esrf.fr

LAB and RESEARCH

"View of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France."

University of Liverpool – XMaS Beamline

The University of Liverpool, along with the University of Warwick manages the XMaS beamline, based at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), in Grenoble, France. The beamline has been designed to perform high-resolution X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-Ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), primarily for studies of materials science over an energy range of 2.1–40 keV in a focused monochromatic beam mode.

EXPERIMENTAL EQUIPMENT

"Overview of the experimental cabin of the XMaS beamline in Grenoble."

"View of the 6 circle Huber diffractometer on the XMaS beamline configured to perform surface X-ray diffraction."

XMaS beamline

The heart of the XMaS instrument is the Huber 6 circle non magnetic diffractometer. This instrument can perform high resolution diffraction, scattering in both horizontal and vertical geometries. Also, a whole suite of detectors can be mounted onto this versatile instrument to perform XAS in both fluorescence and transmission modes. The X-ray beam arrives from the right of the image and passes through various beam conditioning components to the diffractometer to the left of the image.

PEOPLE

Paul THOMPSON

Paul has been working on the XMaS beamline in Grenoble since 1996. He has been part of a team developing x-ray instrumentation and sample environments for use on the beamline and many of these developments have been used at other facilities or commercialized. During the last five or so years, he has optimized the XMaS beamline to enable high quality X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS), in the energy range 2.1-40 keV to be acquired, whilst also being able to perform high resolution X-ray diffraction (XRD), that can to be easily measured in a wide range of sample environments.