A novel mirror bender system utilizing cam-shaft mover (CSM) with 100 µm eccentricity was designed and successfully tested. The system was initially tested and characterized in the laboratory, and then later the performance was verified using the Advanced Photon Source synchrotron radiation source. The force from the two separate CSMs is translated to both ends of a mirror through a small-diameter bellows feed-through. The system uses an internal spring assembly to compensate for atmospheric pressure. A compact gear box with 10:1 ratio between the stepper motor and cam shaft is used to increase the precision of the bender system. This bender system is equipped with a precise rotary potentiometer and load cell for feedback. A system resolution better than 0.2 µm per step was achieved. This bender system was designed as a separate unit, is very compact and can be used to bend a mirror in both the vertical and horizontal planes. Details of the system design, changes made from the prototype system to the production unit and test results are presented here.

A system is presented which combines photoelectron spectroscopy with complementary characterization techniques in order to provide in situ analysis of surfaces processes. The real-time capability of photoelectron spectroscopy has been enabled by an electron counting array detector that allows core and valence level spectra to be recorded in 1–10 s using a laboratory X-ray source and as low as 25 ms when coupled to synchrotron radiation source.

The efficient detection system is combined with a versatile heater stage, temperature and vacuum monitoring, and controllable evaporation sources in order to monitor chemical, structural and electronic changes in situ. The heated stage allows a range of programmed heating and cooling regimes to be applied to samples. Evaporation sources are provided for medium-temperature materials such as small organic molecules and high-temperature metals such as aluminium. The system has a linked vacuum vessel for plasma etching and Ar ion sputtering for surface preparation.

A superconducting planar undulator with 9.5 mm pole gap, 16 mm period and required peak field 0.64 T is at present under development at the Advanced Photon Source. Magnet structure precision is a key component of the project. The current design of the magnet structure is based on the assembled jaws with individual poles, while previous designs utilized solid cores with machined coil grooves. Each jaw has a core with pole grooves and separate precise poles inserted in these grooves and fixed with small screws. This approach allows achieving a uniformity of the poles thickness to within 15 µm, improving the surface finish, as well as using magnetic poles with non-magnetic cores. Several 42-pole jaws have already been produced, wound and tested. Magnetic measurements of the first structure have confirmed the mechanical precision of the assemblies. Details of the magnet structure design and jaw assembly, and changes made from the first prototype system to the production unit, are presented here.

Micro-beam Laue diffraction is a well-established technique to determine lattice orientation and lattice structure. A polychromatic X-ray beam is used to illuminate a scattering volume within individual crystallites. The resulting diffraction pattern consists of a number of Laue spots. By refinement of the exact spot positions, lattice orientation and deviatoric elastic strain of the single crystalline scattering volume can be determined. Diffraction spot shape is linked to the orientation spread in the scattering volume arising due to the local dislocation structure. However, angular resolution of Laue diffraction spots is limited due to small sample-to-detector distance (~100 mm) and large Laue camera pixel size (~40 µm). In contrast, X-ray diffraction topography allows high-resolution imaging of an individual reflection from a crystal. On beamline B16 at the Diamond Light Source, we have combined micro-beam Laue diffraction with simultaneous collection of diffraction topographs, using a second high-resolution X-ray camera in the far field. In situ deformation of a single grain within a thin Ni foil has been studied using this setup. While detailed analysis is ongoing, some early results are presented here to allow an assessment of the technique's utility and future development possibilities.

As part of phase 1 of the European synchrotron radiation facility (ESRF) upgrade programme, a new beamline (UPBL6) for the study of electronic excitations using inelastic scattering and emission spectroscopy will be designed and constructed. The new beamline will provide an intense stable X-ray beam at two different spectrometers to be used on a time-shared basis. One of the spectrometers will be dedicated to resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS); the other to X-ray Raman spectroscopy (XRS). This beamline is currently (June 2010) in the design phase and may be fully operational by early 2013.

We studied X-ray Fourier transform holography using separated holography-mask and sample geometry. The method was successfully applied to the imaging of the magnetic nanostructure using soft X-ray in addition to the cross-sectional imaging of Cu interconnect lines using hard X-ray.

Understanding the effects of thermal disorder on extended X-ray absorption fine structure increases the accuracy of results and allows one to gain original insights on local dynamical properties. Some recent advances are reviewed here.

The in-vacuum undulator (IVU) controller has been developed and applied in Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), China. The controller based on programmable logic controller (PLC) mainly controls two stepper motors for regulating the gap and taper of magnet array, implement automatic control of the correction coil power supplies, etc. In addition, the controller is also provided with a local and remote working mode. This paper mainly introduces related hardware and software design for the IVU controller.

Polychromators, or elliptically bent diffracting crystals that focus a broad-bandwidth X-ray beam onto a sample, have become a common device at synchrotron beamlines specializing in X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) because they allow a full absorption spectrum to be collected in one shot. Such a device is being planned for the XAS beamline I20 of the Diamond Light Source. A bent silicon crystal diffracting 7 keV X-rays with the (1 1 1) reflection is taken as a model for the simulations of this report. Instrumental resolution is determined by the demagnification of the source, the spread of the diffracted beam during propagation and the pixel size of the position-sensitive detector placed behind the sample. The first is calculated by geometrical optics. The second is calculated by a full wave-optical treatment, which includes Takagi–Taupin integration to find the diffracted amplitude at the crystal's surface and Huygens–Fresnel propagation of the diffracted wave to the sample or detector. This sets the polychromator's intrinsic energy resolution. The pixel size of the detector is then added to find the total instrumental resolution at various sample–detector distances.

The orbital ordering in perovskite-type vanadium oxides, RVO3 (R: rare earth), has been investigated by resonant X-ray scattering (RXS) near the V K-edge energy. The G-type orbital order, C-type orbital order and orbital disorder phases are elucidated on the basis of the azimuthal-angle and polarization dependence of the RXS signal reflecting the orbital ordering.

The 3 GeV Taiwan Photon Source (TPS) is designed to produce an electron beam with small emittance and to be maintained with top-up operation. The vacuum systems of the TPS-pulsed magnets in the storage ring include four kicker ceramic chambers for the stored beam and an injection chamber for the injected beam. The prototypical design, manufacturing process and some test results for these chambers are described.

With modern undulators generating light of an arbitrary polarization state, experiments exploiting this feature in the soft X-ray region are becoming increasingly widespread. Circularly polarized light in the soft X-ray region is of particular interest to investigate of magnetic metals such as Fe, Co and Ni, and the rare earths. A versatile multilayer polarimeter has been designed and developed to characterize the polarization state of the soft X-ray beam. A W/B4C multilayer transmission phase retarder and reflection analyser has been used for polarimetry measurements on the beamline (I06) at Diamond Light Source. The design details of the polarimeter and preliminary polarimetry results are presented.

Understanding the physics of strongly correlated systems is one of the most challenging tasks of condensed matter research. Besides displaying extremely interesting physical behaviour, their sensitivity to small changes in external parameters makes them highly appealing for future technological applications. That sensitivity is attributed to the small value of the electron bandwidth W in comparison with other relevant energy scales such as the electron correlation U or the charge transfer (CT) energy gap Δ. While being a challenging experimental technique, the application of high pressure (HP) through a diamond anvil cell (DAC) permits to tune the bandwidth W continuously and without introducing impurities or disorder. Because of the small throughput of DACs, infrared (IR) measurements at HP take great advantage of the use of a high-brightness source as a synchrotron IR source (Lupi et al. 2007). We review here our latest results on several correlated insulators of the Mott–Hubbard and CT type.

The National Synchrotron Light Source II currently under construction at the Brookhaven National Laboratory is expected to provide unprecedented orbit stability in the storage ring in order to fully utilize the very small emittance of the electron beam. The desire to measure the position of such small beams to high resolution imposes stringent requirements on the thermal and structural stability of the supports for the beam postion monitor (BPM) pick-up electrodes located on multi-pole vacuum chambers and more so on those located upstream and downstream of insertion device sources where the beam size is the smallest. Even with tunnel air temperature expected to be controlled to ±0.1°C, low coefficient of thermal expansion materials is required to meet this level of thermal stability. Here, we present the application of these materials to the design of stable supports for radio frequency (RF)-BPMs as well as the methods of testing their performance.

The meta-foil is an all-metal self-supported electromagnetic metamaterial that features a space-grid that is locally stiff, yet globally flexible. Owing to its mechanical, thermal, chemical and radiative robustness, it lends itself to widespread applications.

National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a new state-of-the-art third-generation light source under construction at Brookhaven National Laboratory is expected to have extremely small emittance and extraordinary beam stability. The mechanical requirements for beam diagnostics and instrumentation are exceptionally challenging. Here we present an overview of the mechanical aspects of some NSLS-II diagnostics as well as the performance levels of some systems currently under development.

Crystallinity of area-selective Ge layer with a (0 0 1) surface grown on Si substrate has been investigated by means of diffractometry using a parallel X-ray microbeam. The measured lattice parameters of 〈0 0 1〉 direction were about 0.17% smaller than that of bulk Ge crystal. This tensile strain value was almost the same as the simulated ones that used the finite-element method.

The FERMI@ELETTRA Free-Electron-Laser (FEL) project at the ELETTRA Laboratory of Sincrotrone Trieste, currently under construction and commissioning, will comprise a linear accelerator and two FEL beamlines. Two identical magnetic chicanes for bunch length compression will be installed in the linear accelerator (LINAC) tunnel. The first bunch compressor, at 300 MeV, has been recently installed and commissioned while the production and installation plan of the second one (at 600 MeV) is being defined. The chicane mechanical design has been achieved in collaboration with the supplier, Rial Vacuum srl. In this paper, the chicane mechanical design and the movable vacuum chambers are presented.

The new Core-XAS (X-ray absorption spectroscopy) beamline (B18) at Diamond aims to provide a reliable spectrometer for a broad scientific community. With this in mind, B18 has been built as a general-purpose beamline and offers to users a variety of sample environments and detection methods. Here we will present the first commissioning results and some of the capabilities of this versatile instrument.

Two in-vacuum undulators (IVU25) have been used since March 2009 at the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility. Another small-gap in-vacuum undulator with a smaller period length of 20 mm was completed in July 2010. The mechanical system of IVU25 consists of support frame, driving and guiding system, taper mechanism, compensation spring system, suspending rods assembly, etc. We have attempted to manufacture IVU25 with high mechanical stability, rigidity and reproducible gap motion. A mechanical design study of IVU25 is carried out which includes finite-element calculations on the mechanical deformation of the girder. Some modifications have been made to the design of IVU20.