New JUNGFRAU detector in action for MX at Diamond
Feb 25, 2026
As part of the BBSRC ALERT funding scheme, Diamond recently secured a £1.3M award for a state-of-the-art JUNGFRAU 9M detector to support Diamond’s Microfocus Macromolecular Crystallography beamline I24. This new generation of detector will facilitate a leap forward in time-resolved structural biology research for Diamond’s users. The detector will allow access to much faster timescales – as fast as microseconds - than was previously impossible with the existing detectors in use.
The detector has now been installed at beamline I24 and the first ‘real-world’ data collected. The quality of the data recorded is excellent and even ahead of upcoming upgrades to the beamline, excellent data could be collected at 1 and 2 kHz.
The Jungfrau detector is an exciting addition to the beamline. The high quality of the first data collected are extremely encouraging and illustrate the gains the detector will provide for fast experiments at I24. Operation of the detector was made possible by multiple teams including designers, detector and software scientists, technicians, and beamline staff working together to get the JF9M up and running in a very tight timeframe.
Robin Owen, I24 Principal Beamline Scientist
The new detector brings challenges, not least the huge volume of data that can be generated. This will be addressed in part by high power on-beamline processing using NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip nodes. The GH200 are powerful CPU-GPU hybrid machines that are powerful enough to both reconstruct the 45 GB/s Jungfrau9M images, crystallographically process, and assess them for data quality in real-time.
Ongoing upgrades to I24 such as the detector positioning project will facilitate switching of detectors, while the upcoming double mirror multilayer (DMM) will provide a large jump in photon flux, allowing fast time points to be probed in challenging protein systems using serial crystallography.
Users interested in collecting either serial or conventional diffraction data using the Jungfrau 9M detector are encouraged to contact I24 beamline staff.
- Image: Jungfrau 9M detector in-situ at I24 with a section of an exemplar diffraction image collected at 1 kHz from a human deacetylase and resulting electron density obtained from a single crystal at 100 K.
You can read more about the award and those involved: Diamond secures £1.3M award to help equip the bioscience community for world-leading research
Diamond Light Source is the UK's national synchrotron science facility, located at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.
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