Goodbye, Charlie!

These are the dewars that shipped on Monday May 5, the first day of the ALS shutdown. Thirty of those are from the BCSB beamlines!

We are back up from the long ALS shutdown, and the beamlines are in good shape. We completed a number of projects on the sector 5 beamlines, in particular, as well as performed maintenance on a number of systems: – Pilatus3 6M installed on 5.0.1. The install went well, and tests with x-rays show that…

The next test is to run the 501 and 502 Pilatus detectors simultaneously off the same PPU.

It turns out there is a small cyclotron at LBNL! It is used to produce medical isotopes used for PET scans. Some of the BCSB staff were lucky enough to be invited on a tour of the cyclotron, which is in building 56, not too far away from our more familiar synchrotron in building 6.

Our second User Forum was on March 4, in which we discussed the purchase of a pixel-array detector for beamline 5.0.2. The exciting news since then is that we will be able to purchase a Pilatus 6M for the beamline. Expected delivery is in September of this year.

The third User Forum was on April 2, in which we discussed the diode-beamstop device which the BCSB is developing (allows measurement of flux during data collection), as well as the MiniKappa interlocks on beamline 5.0.2, which will now allow a full 360 rotation of omega (sometimes called Phi) with a maximum kappa angle of 55 degrees.