Big Dewar Day – 22 outgoing dewars

Recently, Marc helped a user run some crystals which the user had arranged to have grown in zero-gravity. Here are pictures of the crystal capillaries mounted at the beamline, and the raster grid used to locate crystals within a capillary.

Another one of those Mondays at the beamline:

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.

Here it is at beamline 5.0.2, unpacked from the wooden crate, but not unpacked from its case yet. Install and commissioning in the beamline will begin in just a few weeks!

We measured the temperature at the sample during warming of the pin base, and preliminary tests so far show that the heat is not transferred to the loop during two minutes of base warming. Tests are continuing now to determine how well the warmer removes ice and frost from the bases.

Images of a crystal in a loop before and after using the pin base warmer:

Anthony installed the first pin base warmer on 5.0.2 today. We have to wait until the ALS has LN restored before we can test it. One thing to note: the people we spoke to at NE-CAT about their pin base warmer told us that it does not actually solve the icing issue completely. They still do see pins move on the goniometer after mounting. Hopefully the warmer will help a bit, though!