Science And Technology Facilities Council Research Articles

Development of data correction for the 1M Large Pixel Detector at the EuXFEL

We present the development of a gain correction process for the Large Pixel Detector (LPD) developed by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) for the Femtosecond X-Ray Experiment (FXE) instrument based at the European X-ray Free Electron Laser (EuXFEL). LPD operates at 4.5 MHz as necessitated by EuXFEL's pulse timing structure and has a large dynamic range capturing a maximum of 105 photons/pixel @ 12 keV. Experiments at FXE require highly accurate measurements of relative changes in X-ray scattering intensity on the MHz timescale making a correction bringing LPD pixel outputs in line against a common axis essential to understanding experimental results. To facilitate the operational needs of LPD at FXE more than 1.5 billion correction coefficients are required, with corrections generated on a per pixel, per memory cell and per gain stage basis. By comparing output LPD signals to an independent reference diode a linear gain correction has been developed and applied to LPD data. Improvements in image quality have been quantified using the standard deviation in the measured intensity per pixel for a given radius from the beam centre. Improvements to detector uniformity of up to 30.0% are demonstrated in the medium gain stage and 15.9% in the high gain stage. This paper presents an in-depth view of the gain correction development process and further results.

Experience with Rucio in the wider HEP community

Managing the data of scientific projects is an increasingly complicated challenge, which was historically met by developing experiment-specific solutions. However, the ever-growing data rates and requirements of even small experiments make this approach very difficult, if not prohibitive. In recent years, the scientific data management system Rucio has evolved into a successful open-source project that is now being used by many scientific communities and organisations. Rucio is incorporating the contributions and expertise of many scientific projects and is offering common features useful to a diverse research community. This article describes the recent experiences in operating Rucio, as well as contributions to the project, by ATLAS, Belle II, CMS, ESCAPE, IGWN, LDMX, Folding@Home, and the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

Effect of Anode Slippage on Cathode Cutoff Potential and Degradation Mechanisms in Ni-Rich Li-Ion Batteries

This work is supported by the Faraday Institution under grant number FIRG001. The authors are grateful to A. Jansen, S. Trask, B.J. Polzin, and A.R. Dunlop at the U.S. Department of Energy’s CAMP (Cell Analysis, Modeling, and Prototyping) Facility, Argonne National Laboratory, for producing and supplying the electrodes in this work. The authors are grateful to the Diamond Light Source for allocating beam time for the operando long-duration PXRD experiments, and to K. Kleiner, S. Day and C. Tang for their experimental support. C.X. gratefully acknowledges support from a Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Experimental Design Award from the STFC Batteries Network (ST/R006873/1).

INSTITUT LAUE-LANGEVIN (ILL) AS A FORM OF SCIENTIFIC COOPERATION

The integration of states in the field of education has given rise to the expansion of various forms of cooperation in this area. The subject of the study is one of the large-scale scientific projects called "megasience" — Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL), based in Grenoble, France. Such international research centers are designed to achieve breakthrough discoveries, like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe, the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States, and neutron research through the research reactor complex PIK, under construction in Russia. Large research infrastructures are an important phenomenon of public life. In France, megasience installations are officially called "very large research infrastructures", briefly TGIR, in Australia — "landmark research infrastructures".The Institut Laue-Langevin is established as a national legal entity and is managed by three partner countries: France through the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS); Germany through the Jülich Research Centre (FZJ) and the United Kingdom through the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).This form of cooperation between countries, integration of states in the field of education has a number of positive aspects and can be used in Russia to find the most effective model for organizing mega-science projects. Thus, ILL make ot possible to use different sources of funding-funds from both the state and private research and grants, as well as European projects. The ILL provides for the possibility of diverse cooperation and participation of various states, the involvement of scientists and individuals, including non-European countries, open membership. The positive features are also the ease of management and reorientation of ILL, flexibility, as well as the ease of cooperation with various institutions of both national and European and international level.

Prototype 1 MeV X -band linac for aviation cargo inspection

Aviation cargo unit load device (ULD) containers are typically much smaller than standard shipping containers, with a volume of around 1 m3. Standard 3-6 MeV x-ray screening linacs have too much energy to obtain sufficient contrast when inspecting ULDs, hence a lower 1 MeV linac is required. In order to obtain a small physical footprint, which can be adapted to mobile platform applications, a compact design is required, hence X-band radio-frequency technology is the ideal solution. A prototype 1.45 MeV linac cavity optimized for this application has been designed by Lancaster University and Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), manufactured by Comeb (Italy) and tested at Daresbury Laboratory using an e2v magnetron, modulator, and electron gun. The cavity is a bi-periodic π/2 structure, with beam-pipe aperture coupling to simplify the manufacture at the expense of shunt impedance, while keeping the transverse size as small as possible. The design, manufacture, and testing of this linac structure is presented. In order to optimize the image it is necessary to be able to modify the energy of the linac. It can be changed by altering the rf power from the magnetron but this also varies the magnetron frequency. By varying the beam current from 0-70 mA the beam energy varied from 1.45 to 1.2 MeV. This allows fast energy variation by altering the focus electrode bias voltage on the electron gun while keeping the dose rate constant by varying the repetition frequency. Varying the beam energy by varying the rf power and by varying the beam current are both studied experimentally. The momentum spread on the electron beam was between 1% and 5% depending on the beam current of 0-70 mA

STFC Food Network+

Professor Sarah Bridle, Principle Investigator for the STFC Food Network+, describes the launch of the Network and its ambitions to apply the skills and facilities of the Science and Technology Facilities Council to tackling the challenges facing food supply.

Earth science at the UK's deepest laboratory

Deep below the coast of North Yorkshire, UK, scientists are conducting world-class research into elusive dark matter and life on other planets, and are using the products of exploding stars to combat climate change and revolutionize how we monitor the storage of CO2 emitted from industry. Boulby Underground Laboratory is hosted within Boulby Mine, the deepest active mine in the UK. Funded by the UK government through the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the laboratory sits within a tunnel hewn from halite at a depth of 1100 m. Originally built for research into particle and astrophysics, recent years have seen a move unprecedented among similar facilities around the world—a significant expansion of research into a wide variety of other scientific fields. Today, Earth science research at Boulby includes Muon tomography for monitoring deep carbon sequestration, ultra-low-background gamma spectroscopy, studies of life in extreme environments, and developing Mars rover equipment to analyse Martian geology.

Molecular gas on large circumgalactic scales at z = 3.47

This paper makes use of the following ALMA data: ADS/JAO.ALMA#2012.1.00423.S. ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), NSF (USA) and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada) and NSC and ASIAA (Taiwan) and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, AUI/NRAO and NAOJ. RM acknowledges support from the ERC Advanced Grant 695671 ‘QUENCH’. RM, SC and FB acknowledge support from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement no. 306476.

Reducing power usage on demand

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) datacentre provides large- scale High Performance Computing facilities for the scientific community. It currently consumes approximately 1.5MW and this has risen by 25% in the past two years. STFC has been investigating leveraging preemption in the Tier 1 batch farm to save power.HEP experiments are increasing using jobs that can be killed to take advantage of opportunistic CPU resources or novel cost models such as Amazon's spot pricing. Additionally, schemes from energy providers are available that offer financial incentives to reduce power consumption at peak times.Under normal operating conditions, 3% of the batch farm capacity is wasted due to draining machines. By using preempt-able jobs, nodes can be rapidly made available to run multicore jobs without this wasted resource. The use of preempt-able jobs has been extended so that at peak times machines can be hibernated quickly to save energy.This paper describes the implementation of the above and demonstrates that STFC could in future take advantage of such energy saving schemes.

CERN@school: bringing CERN into the classroom

CERN@school brings technology from CERN into the classroom to aid with the teaching of particle physics. It also aims to inspire the next generation of physicists and engineers by giving participants the opportunity to be part of a national collaboration of students, teachers and academics, analysing data obtained from detectors based on the ground and in space to make new, curiosity-driven discoveries at school. CERN@school is based around the Timepix hybrid silicon pixel detector developed by the Medipix 2 Collaboration, which features a 300 μm thick silicon sensor bump-bonded to a Timepix readout ASIC. This defines a 256-by-256 grid of pixels with a pitch of 55 μm, the data from which can be used to visualise ionising radiation in a very accessible way. Broadly speaking, CERN@school consists of a web portal that allows access to data collected by the Langton Ultimate Cosmic ray Intensity Detector (LUCID) experiment in space and the student-operated Timepix detectors on the ground; a number of Timepix detector kits for ground-based experiments, to be made available to schools for both teaching and research purposes; and educational resources for teachers to use with LUCID data and detector kits in the classroom. By providing access to cutting-edge research equipment, raw data from ground and space-based experiments, CERN@school hopes to provide the foundation for a programme that meets the many of the aims and objectives of CERN and the project's supporting academic and industrial partners. The work presented here provides an update on the status of the programme as supported by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. This includes recent results from work with the GridPP Collaboration on using grid resources with schools to run GEANT4 simulations of CERN@school experiments.

Public Outreach at RAL: Engaging the Next Generation of Scientists and Engineers

The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) is part of the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). As part of the Royal Charter that established the STFC, the organisation is required to generate public awareness and encourage public engagement and dialogue in relation to the science undertaken. The staff at RAL firmly support this activity as it is important to encourage the next generation of students to consider studying Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) subjects, providing the UK with a highly skilled work-force in the future. To this end, the STFC undertakes a variety of outreach activities.This paper will describe the outreach activities undertaken by RAL, particularly focussing on those of the Scientific Computing Department (SCD). These activities include: an Arduino based activity day for 12-14 year-olds to celebrate Ada Lovelace day; running a centre as part of the Young Rewired State - encouraging 11-18 year-olds to create web applications with open data; sponsoring a team in the Engineering Education Scheme - supporting a small team of 16-17 year-olds to solve a real world engineering problem; as well as the more traditional tours of facilities. These activities could serve as an example for other sites involved in scientific computing around the globe.

The Diamond Light Source.

This Current Commentary was prompted by a recent talk given by Laura Holland, at Reading Skeptics in the Pub, about the Diamond Light Source, where she is the Outreach and Events Manager. Skeptics in the Pub (1) is a growing, informal network of (usually) monthly meetings, where the invited speaker presents a topic of interest in a pub, which is followed by a discussion. A broad range of subjects is aired, covering various aspects of science and technology, and such diverse matters as philosophy, homeopathy, the media, education, electric cars, GM crops, the paranormal, and depletion of the Earth's resources (which I have spoken about to various Skeptics groups). Skeptics in some respects resembles Cafe Scientifique, although the latter meetings (2) tend to be more particularly focussed on features of science and technology. Diamond (3) (Figure 1) is the UK's national synchrotron science facility, and is situated on the Harwell campus in Oxfordshire, which also houses the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. The campus is owned by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the Health Protection Agency. It is managed by Harwell Oxford Developments Ltd. The Diamond synchrotron can produce intense beams of light, said (3) to be 10 billion times brighter than the sun. Here, the term does not only refer to the region of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to humans (namely wavelengths in the 400-700 nm range), since Diamond generates synchrotron light, which is a spectrum of electromagnetic radiation spanning X-rays to microwaves. The UK led the world with the first second-generation light source, the SRS at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, which opened in 1981. The SRS proved how vital synchrotrons are to researchers from a wide range of disciplines and, when it had expanded as much as it could, scientists and engineers began designing a third generation synchrotron for the UK. Diamond is the largest scientific facility to be built in the UK, since the Nimrod proton synchrotron at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory (RAL) in 1964. Nimrod was converted into the (ISIS) neutron spallation source in 1977. ISIS is not an acronym, but is both the name by which the River Thames is known locally, and a goddess of Ancient Egypt who could restore life to the dead: this seemed appropriate since the ISIS facility was partially constructed from cannibalised equipment from the Nimrod and NINA accelerators. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] In contrast, DIAMOND is an acronym: Dipole And Multipole Output for the Nation at Daresbury, as derived by Mike Poole, who inaugurated the DIAMOND project. Since the facility is no longer at Daresbury, it is said that the name now reflects the fact that the synchrotron light is both 'hard' (as in the hard X-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum) and bright, similar to those qualities of a diamond. The Diamond facility cost an initial 260 m [pounds sterling] to build, including the synchrotron building, the accelerators, the first seven beamlines and the adjacent office block, Diamond House. 86% of Diamond's funding comes from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and 14% from the Wellcome Trust. More than 3,000 research workers carry out experiments using synchrotron radiation at Diamond, and are assisted by some 500 permanent staff there. Features of synchrotron radiation 1. A wide energy-range of the electromagnetic spectrum, spanning X-rays to microwaves. 2. The very intense beam of photons means that crystals that scatter radiation only weakly may be studied, and experiments can be done rapidly. 3. Due to a small divergence and small size source (spatial coherence), a highly collimated beam is obtained. 4. A source stability is obtained at the sub-micron level. 5. Both linear and circular polarisation are possible. 6. …

Interconnect and bonding techniques for pixelated X-ray and gamma-ray detectors

In the last decade, the Detector Development Group at the Technology Department of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), U.K., established a variety of fabrication and bonding techniques to build pixelated X-ray and γ-ray detector systems such as the spectroscopic X-ray imaging detector HEXITEC [1]. The fabrication and bonding of such devices comprises a range of processes including material surface preparation, photolithography, stencil printing, flip-chip and wire bonding of detectors to application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC). This paper presents interconnect and bonding techniques used in the fabrication chain for pixelated detectors assembled at STFC. For this purpose, detector dies (∼ 20× 20 mm2) of high quality, single crystal semiconductors, such as cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) are cut to the required thickness (up to 5mm). The die surfaces are lapped and polished to a mirror-finish and then individually processed by electroless gold deposition combined with photolithography to form 74× 74 arrays of 200 μ m × 200 μ m pixels with 250 μ m pitch. Owing to a lack of availability of CZT wafers, lithography is commonly carried out on individual detector dies which represents a significant technical challenge as the edge of the pixel array and the surrounding guard band lies close to the physical edge of the crystal. Further, such detector dies are flip-chip bonded to readout ASIC using low-temperature curing silver-loaded epoxy so that the stress between the bonded detector die and the ASIC is minimized. In addition, this reduces crystalline modifications of the detector die that occur at temperature greater than 150\\r{ }C and have adverse effects on the detector performance. To allow smaller pitch detectors to be bonded, STFC has also developed a compression cold-weld indium bump bonding technique utilising bumps formed by a photolithographic lift-off technique.

PiMS: a data management system for structural proteomics.

PiMS (Protein Information Management System) is a laboratory information management system for protein scientists. It enables researchers to enter data, track samples, and report results during the production of recombinant proteins for structural and functional applications. PiMS is the only custom LIMS for protein production, recording data from the selected target to the sample of soluble protein. The xtalPIMS extension supports crystallogenesis and has recently been extended to support crystal fishing and crystal treatment. PiMS can be configured to match local working methods by defining protocols. These are used to provide templates for recording details of the experiments. PiMS will continue to be developed in response to the needs of users to provide a unified and extensible set of software tools for protein sciences. The vision for PiMS is that it will become the laboratory standard for protein-related data management. The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) distributes PiMS free to academic users under the Community Model.

Pulse fidelity in ultra-high-power (petawatt class) laser systems

Abstract There are several petawatt-scale laser facilities around the world and the fidelity of the pulses to target is critical in achieving the highest focused intensities and the highest possible contrast. The United Kingdom has three such laser facilities which are currently open for access to the academic community: Orion at AWE, Aldermaston and Vulcan & Astra-Gemini at the Central Laser Facility (CLF), STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). These facilities represent the two main classes of petawatt facilities: the mixed OPCPA/Nd:glass high-energy systems of Orion and Vulcan and the ultra-short-pulse Ti:Sapphire system of Astra-Gemini. Many of the techniques used to enhance and control the pulse generation and delivery to target have been pioneered on these facilities. In this paper, we present the system designs which make this possible and discuss the contrast enhancement schemes that have been implemented.

Joint STFC Futures/BIR workshop “Cancer care: new detector and sensor technologies and their potential impact”, Harwell Oxford, 5–6 October 2011

The workshop "Cancer care: new detector and sensor technologies and their potential impact", organised jointly by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the British Institute of Radiology, brought together representatives from the cancer community (clinicians, medical physicists, National Health Service representatives and general practitioners with an interest in cancer) and STFC-supported scientists involved in basic research in physics and technology. The workshop aimed to raise awareness of the cancer challenge, share knowledge and identify novel solutions in the area of detectors and sensors to addressing the cancer challenge. A further aim of this workshop was to commence discussion on the formation of new multidisciplinary community networks. The workshop identified the synergies between the two communities and the potential for developing new collaborative ideas and projects.

Highlights of the “Space Weather Risks and Society” Workshop

Highlights of the “Space Weather Risks and Society” Workshop

News

News

Shaping our Future: Diamond Phase III Beamline Consultation

In October 2010, the UK Government confirmed that Diamond Light Source Phase III will go ahead as planned. Chancellor George Osborne announced £69 million capital funding over the next four years as part of a government strategy to invest in national infrastructure projects that contribute to economic growth. A total £111.2 million capital investment is forecast over the seven-year Phase III project period, £97.7 million coming from the government through the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and £13.5 million from the Wellcome Trust.

Yellow Light for British Science

After months of hearing from anxious astronomers and physicists, the United Kingdom's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has detailed its plans to spend $3.9 billion over the next 3 years. Despite new investments in projects that include the proposed Extremely Large Telescope and the