First commissioning results for insertion devices published

The intense X-ray light for each of the MAX IV beamlines is generated when fast electrons fly through an array of magnets, placed in a so-called insertion device.

In a recent report, our insertion device team present the commissioning results for the first nine of these beamline specific instruments.
At synchrotrons like MAX IV, we accelerate electrons to velocities close to the speed of light. The electrons are injected into storage rings where they travel turn after turn inside a vacuum tube, guided by the strong forces of hundreds of carefully tuned magnets. At certain places along the electron path, the magnets are arranged in arrays called insertion devices that make the electrons wiggle from side to side as they fly through. When the electrons perform this motion, they emit energy in the form of intense X-rays. Each beamline needs its dedicated insertion device, built to produce X-rays optimised for the measurement techniques performed there.
The insertion device team have now published the first commissioning results. At the time the report was written, twelve insertion devices were installed, and nine successfully commissioned to deliver according to specifications. Six of them have been built in-house, and two are transferred from the old MAX-lab and refurbished. The remaining insertion devices come from Hitachi and our French synchrotron colleague SOLEIL.

>Read more on the MAX IV Laboratory website

Towards upscaling the production of graphene nanoribbons for electronics

Two-dimensional sheets of graphene in the form of ribbons a few tens of nanometers across have unique properties that are highly interesting for use in future electronics.

Researchers have now for the first time fully characterised nanoribbons grown in both the two possible configurations on the same wafer with a clear route towards upscaling the production.
Graphene in the form of nanoribbons show so called ballistic transport, which means that the material does not heat up when a current flow through it. This opens up an interesting path towards high speed, low power nanoelectronics. The nanoribbon form may also let graphene behave more like a semiconductor, which is the type of material found in transistors and diodes. The properties of graphene nanoribbons are closely related to the precise structure of the edges of the ribbon. Also, the symmetry of the graphene structure lets the edges take two different configurations, so called zigzag and armchair, depending on the direction of the long respective short edge of the ribbon.

See some video interviews and the entire article on the MAX IV website

Biological material discovered in Jurassic fossil


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The quest for better medical imaging at MAX IV

Advances in the world of physics often quickly lead to advances in the world of medical diagnostics. From the moment Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays he was using them to look through his wife’s hand.

A lot of the physics principles at the foundation of MAX IV are also at the foundation of medical imaging technologies such as nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, x-ray computed tomography and positron emission tomography.
Positron emission spectroscopy is more commonly known as PET imaging. It’s a method used to study metabolic processes in the body as a research tool but also to diagnose disease. An important use today is in the diagnosis of metastases in cancer patients, but it can also be used to diagnose certain types of dementia.

In PET, a positron-emitting radionuclide is injected into a patient and travels around the body until it accumulates somewhere, depending on the chemical composition. For example, the fluorine-18 radionuclide when bound to deoxyglucose accumulates in metabolically active cells which is useful for finding metastases. The radionuclide is unstable and emits positrons which is the antimatter equivalent of an electron. When a positron and an electron inevitably meet, they annihilate one another, producing two pulses of gamma radiation traveling in opposite directions. By placing a detector around a patient, it is possible to measure the gamma radiation and convert the signal into something that can be more easily measured. These detectors are made up of materials known as scintillators which take high energy radiation and emit lower energy radiation that can be detected using fast photodetectors – photomultiplier tubes.

>Read more on the MAX IV Laboratory website


The human behind the beamline

Happy Birthday, Felix Bloch – 23rd October 1905

Felix Bloch was born on this day (23rd October) in 1905 in Zürich, Switzerland. He got a Ph.D. in 1928 studying under Werner Heisenberg. In his thesis, he established the quantum theory of solids describing how electrons moved through crystalline materials using Bloch waves. The phenomena he described are observed today using the technique ARPES which is carried out at the Bloch beamline at MAX IV.

>Read more on the MAX IV Laboratory website

Image: Detail of a Max Bloch illustration. To discover the entire illustration click here.
Credit: Emelie Hilner.

The search for clean hydrogen fuel





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Acid-base equilibria: not exactly like you remember in chemistry class

Work published in the Royal Society of Chemistry with the support of the Helmholtz Association through the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science at DESY, MAX IV Laboratory, Lund University, Sweden,  European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 and the Academy of Finland.

Remember doing titrations in chemistry class? Adding acid drop-by-drop to the beaker and the moment you took your eye off it the solution completely changed colour.
We learned in chemistry that by doing this titration, we were actually affecting an important equilibrium in the beaker between acids and bases. This equilibrium was first described at the turn of the 20th century by American biochemist Lawrence Henderson and modified by Karl Hasselbalch giving us the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation. The discovery and subsequent study of acids and bases using this equation has led to the discovery of many important phenomena in the natural world from as how cells function to how materials are formed.

However, after years of study, an idea arose that questioned the validity of the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation, what happens at the surface? If you have a beaker filled with a dilute acid, what happens at the very top atomic layer? The top layer of a liquid in a beaker is special for many reasons, but if you’re a dissolved molecule, it means that you’re no longer surrounded by water on all sides. For hydrophobic molecules, this means that it is favourable to be at the surface. With this in mind, the scientists took another look at the Henderson-Hasselbalch equilibrium equation and thought that it couldn’t work at the surface. Many studies have measured indicator chemical species, and determined that the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation does not seem to apply at the surface, and concluded that the concentration of hydronium or hydroxide ions, which determines the acidity/basicity, is different at the air-liquid interface than in the bulk.

>Read more on the MAXIV Laboratory website



Golden nanoglue completes the wonder material

Modern microelectronics relies on semiconductors and their metal electrodes. High-performance device functionality demands high transistor density within a single chip, which soon will reach the physical limits of bulk materials. Alternatives have been found in atomically thin materials, e.g. graphene and its semiconductive inorganic relatives.

MoS2 (molybdenum disulphide) is the representative inorganic layered crystal with properties similar to those of graphene. To be useful in applications, it must be joined to the metallic electrodes to enable charge flow between the metals and semiconductive (M/S) counterparts. In a recent study, scientists from University of Oulu, Finland have demonstrated the success of joining MoS2 to Ni (nickel) particles by using gold (Au) nanoglue as a buffer material. Through in-house observations and the first-principles calculations, the semiconductor and metal can be bridged either by the crystallized gold nanoparticles, or by the newly formed MoS2-Au-Ni ternary alloy.
A metallic contact is formed, leading to enhanced electron mobility crossing the M/S interface.

>Read more on the MAX IV Laboratory website

Image: representation of gold nanoglue joining molybdenum disulphide and nickel. 

Impressions from the 30th MAX IV user meeting

At the 30th MAX IV user meeting over 250 attendees met to discuss and learn for three days in Lund.

The impressions that we collected from the meeting are positive overall.

>Read more on the MAX IV Laboratory website

First-year operational results of the MAX IV 3 GeV ring

If you fly over MAX IV right now and look down, you’ll see a large circular building. The reason for this size and shape is the 528-meter-long 3GeV storage ring which precisely guides bunches of electrons traveling at velocities approaching the speed of light. As the electrons pass through arrays of magnets called insertion devices, they produce bright X-rays which are then used by beamline scientists to do many different types of experiments.

In an article published this month in the Journal of Synchrotron Radiation, the 3 GeV ring team led by Pedro Tavares describe the results for the first year of operation. This important milestone in the MAX IV project provides validation for many of the brand-new concepts that were implemented in the MAX IV design in order to improve the performance of the machine and reduce downtime.

>Read more on the MAX IV Laboratory website


Synchrotrons in Black and White




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Science Village gets go-ahead to start construction



>Read more about the Science Village.

Illustration: ESS



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Helmholtz International Fellow Award for N. Mårtensson




Linac team has reached major milestones





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Picture: Linac team at MAX IV.

First serial crystallography experiments performed at BioMAX



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