The crystallography stations at the Alba synchrotron

Abstract

Alba is a 3rd-generation 3 GeV synchrotron facility with an emittance of 4.6nm·rad which has been operational since 2011 and has recently started top-up operation. Photons in a broad energy range of 0.08-80 keV are served to seven beamlines dedicated to a large variety of scientific fields. The portfolio includes two beamlines, XALOC and MSPD, fully dedicated to X-ray crystallography. BL13-XALOC is currently the only macromolecular crystallography beamline. The end-station includes a high-accuracy single-axis diffractometer with a removable minikappa stage, a sample-mounting robot and a large-area, photon-counting detector. The beamline optics, fed by an in-vacuum undulator, deliver a tunable photon beam between 5.5 and 22 keV. The beam size at the sample position can be adjusted by defocusing the mirrors in a range of 50-300μm in the horizontal direction and 5.5-300μm in the vertical direction. Beamline BL04-MSPD, which is fed by a superconducting wiggler, has two in-line end-stations. The first station is devoted to high-pressure/microdiffraction. It offers a \( 15\times 15\) μm beam in the range 20-50 keV, particularly suited for powder diffraction studies requiring a very small beam, e.g. mapping of cultural heritage samples and high-pressures studies. The second station is dedicated to high-resolution/high-throughput powder diffraction. It covers the 8-50 keV range and includes a heavy-duty 3-circle diffractometer equipped with a 13-channel multianalyzer detector with high-angular resolution ( \( \Delta 2\theta=0.004^{\circ}\) FWHM) and a high-throughput, position-sensitive detector spanning \( 40^{\circ}\) in 2\( \theta\) range allowing millisecond data acquisitions.