Village Updates

X-ray spectroscopy is a powerful tool for the determination of local atomic structure in solid, liquid or gaseous matter not characterised by crystalline order. The suite of six Spectroscopy Village beamlines covers a broad portfolio of different techniques including X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS), X-ray Fluorescence (XRF), Imaging, X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Small-Angle Scattering (SAS), Inelastic X-ray Scattering (IXS) and energy dispersive Extended X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (EXAFS).

The Soft Condensed Matter village has a broad reach in terms of scientific coverage of research applications, as well as a variety of experimental methods offered by the four operational beamlines, although its principal focus is in the Life Sciences.

The Engineering and Environment Village incorporates the Powder Diffraction beamline (I11), the Joint Engineering, Environmental and Processing (JEEP) beamline (I12) and the Extreme Conditions beamline (I15). These three facilities cover a range of science that can best be summarised by the study of condensed matter structure under the influence of various external stimuli. However, looking at the application portfolios of the three beamlines, it is clear that there is a very distinct diversification of the actual experiments. From a technical viewpoint, all three beamlines determine structure through the means of diffraction or scattering, although the technique is deployed in quite different ways.

The Surfaces and Interfaces village consists of five operational beamlines: the Angle Resolved Photoelectron Spectroscopy (ARPES) beamline (I05), the Nanoscience beamline (I06), the Surface and Interface Diffraction beamline (I07), the Surface and Interface Structural Analysis (SISA) beamline (I09) and BLADE, the Beamline for Advanced Dichroism Experiments (I10).

The Materials Village beamlines provide a variety of experimental techniques for studying a diverse range of materials. The four village beamlines: Materials and Magnetism (I16), Small-Molecule Diffraction (I19), the Test beamline (B16) and the Imaging and Coherence beamline (I13, with one branchline operated in collaboration with the University of Manchester) continue to produce exciting new science.

The Macromolecular Crystallography (MX) village continues to push the experimental boundaries in structural biology with its five world leading beamlines (I02, I03, I04, I04-1 and I24). A key development during 2014 has been the provision of rapid short turnaround access to the beamlines, allowing increasing numbers of users to exploit the streamlined data collection and analysis systems.