The Biomedical Imaging and Therapy facility of the Canadian Light Source comprises two beamlines, which together cover a wide X-ray energy range from 13 keV up to 140 keV. The beamlines were designed with a focus on synchrotron applications in preclinical imaging and veterinary science as well as microbeam radiation therapy. While these remain a major part of the activities of both beamlines, a number of recent upgrades have enhanced the versatility and performance of the beamlines, particularly for high-resolution microtomography experiments. As a result, the user community has been quickly expanding to include researchers in advanced materials, batteries, fuel cells, agriculture, and environmental studies. This article summarizes the beam properties, describes the endstations together with the detector pool, and presents several application cases of the various X-ray imaging techniques available to users.

The ID10 beamline of the SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) synchrotron light source in Jordan was inaugurated in June 2023 and is now open to scientific users. The beamline, which was designed and installed within the European Horizon 2020 project BEAmline for Tomography at SESAME (BEATS), provides full-field X-ray radiography and microtomography imaging with monochromatic or polychromatic X-rays up to photon energies of 100 keV. The photon source generated by a 2.9 T wavelength shifter with variable gap, and a double-multilayer monochromator system allow versatile application for experiments requiring either an X-ray beam with high intensity and flux, and/or a partially spatial coherent beam for phase-contrast applications. Sample manipulation and X-ray detection systems are designed to allow scanning samples with different size, weight and material, providing image voxel sizes from 13 µm down to 0.33 µm. A state-of-the-art computing infrastructure for data collection, three-dimensional (3D) image reconstruction and data analysis allows the visualization and exploration of results online within a few seconds from the completion of a scan. Insights from 3D X-ray imaging are key to the investigation of specimens from archaeology and cultural heritage, biology and health sciences, materials science and engineering, earth, environmental sciences and more. Microtomography scans and preliminary results obtained at the beamline demonstrate that the new beamline ID10-BEATS expands significantly the range of scientific applications that can be targeted at SESAME.

The split-and-delay unit (SDU) at FLASH2 will be upgraded to enable the simultaneous operation of two temporally, spatially and spectrally separated probe beams when the free-electron laser undulators are operated in a two-color scheme. By means of suitable thin filters and an optical grating beam path a wide range of combinations of photon energies in the spectral range from 150 eV to 780 eV can be chosen. In this paper, simulations of the spectral transmission and performance parameters of the filter technique are discussed, along with a monochromator with dispersion compensation presently under construction.

Full-field transmission X-ray microscopy has been recently implemented at the hard X-ray ROCK–SOLEIL quick-EXAFS beamline, adding micrometre spatial resolution to the second time resolution characterizing the beamline. Benefiting from a beam size versatility due to the beamline focusing optics, full-field hyperspectral XANES imaging has been successfully used at the Fe K-edge for monitoring the pressure-induced spin transition of a 150 µm × 150 µm Fe(o-phen)2(NCS)2 single crystal and the charge of millimetre-sized LiFePO4 battery electrodes. Hyperspectral imaging over 2000 eV has been reported for the simultaneous monitoring of Fe and Cu speciation changes during activation of a FeCu bimetallic catalyst along a millimetre-sized catalyst bed. Strategies of data acquisition and post-data analysis using Jupyter notebooks and multivariate data analysis are presented, and the gain obtained using full-field hyperspectral quick-EXAFS imaging for studies of functional materials under process conditions in comparison with macroscopic information obtained by non-spatially resolved quick-EXAFS techniques is discussed.

Beamline BL08U1A is a soft X-ray spectromicroscopy beamline at Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF) that exhibits the capabilities of high spatial resolution (30 nm) and high energy resolving power (over 104). As a first-generation beamline of SSRF, owing to its continuous operation over the last ten years, an urgent upgrade of the equipment including the monochromator was deemed necessary. The upgrade work included the overall construction of the monochromator and replacement of the mirrors upstream and downstream of the monochromator. Based on its original skeleton, two elliptically cylinder mirrors were designed to focus the beam horizontally, which can increase the flux density by about three times on the exit slits. Meanwhile, the application of variable-line-space gratings in the monochromator demonstrates the dual functions of dispersing and focusing on the exit slits which can decrease abberations dramatically. After the upgrade of the main components of the beamline, the energy range is 180–2000 eV, the energy resolving power reaches 16333 @ 244 eV and 12730 @ 401 eV, and the photon flux measured in the experimental station is over 2.45 × 109 photons s−1 (E/ΔE = 6440 @ 244 eV).

The development of hard X-ray nanoprobe techniques has given rise to a number of experimental methods, like nano-XAS, nano-XRD, nano-XRF, ptychography and tomography. Each method has its own unique data processing algorithms. With the increase in data acquisition rate, the large amount of generated data is now a big challenge to these algorithms. In this work, an intuitive, user-friendly software system is introduced to integrate and manage these algorithms; by taking advantage of the loosely coupled, component-based design approach of the system, the data processing speed of the imaging algorithm is enhanced through optimization of the parallelism efficiency. This study provides meaningful solutions to tackle complexity challenges faced in synchrotron data processing.

This article describes the High-Pressure Freezing Laboratory for Macromolecular Crystallography (HPMX) at the ESRF, and highlights new and complementary research opportunities that can be explored using this facility. The laboratory is dedicated to investigating interactions between macromolecules and gases in crystallo, and finds applications in many fields of research, including fundamental biology, biochemistry, and environmental and medical science. At present, the HPMX laboratory offers the use of different high-pressure cells adapted for helium, argon, krypton, xenon, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide and methane. Important scientific applications of high pressure to macromolecules at the HPMX include noble-gas derivatization of crystals to detect and map the internal architecture of proteins (pockets, tunnels and channels) that allows the storage and diffusion of ligands or substrates/products, the investigation of the catalytic mechanisms of gas-employing enzymes (using oxygen, carbon dioxide or methane as substrates) to possibly decipher intermediates, and studies of the conformational fluctuations or structure modifications that are necessary for proteins to function. Additionally, cryo-cooling protein crystals under high pressure (helium or argon at 2000 bar) enables the addition of cryo-protectant to be avoided and noble gases can be employed to produce derivatives for structure resolution. The high-pressure systems are designed to process crystals along a well defined pathway in the phase diagram (pressure–temperature) of the gas to cryo-cool the samples according to the three-step `soak-and-freeze method'. Firstly, crystals are soaked in a pressurized pure gas atmosphere (at 294 K) to introduce the gas and facilitate its inter­actions within the macromolecules. Samples are then flash-cooled (at 100 K) while still under pressure to cryo-trap macromolecule–gas complexation states or pressure-induced protein modifications. Finally, the samples are recovered after depressurization at cryo-temperatures. The final section of this publication presents a selection of different typical high-pressure experiments carried out at the HPMX, showing that this technique has already answered a wide range of scientific questions. It is shown that the use of different gases and pressure conditions can be used to probe various effects, such as mapping the functional internal architectures of enzymes (tunnels in the haloalkane dehalogenase DhaA) and allosteric sites on membrane-protein surfaces, the interaction of non-inert gases with proteins (oxygen in the hydrogenase ReMBH) and pressure-induced structural changes of proteins (tetramer dissociation in urate oxidase). The technique is versatile and the provision of pressure cells and their application at the HPMX is gradually being extended to address new scientific questions.

we introduce a novel approach for a real-time dual-frequency feedback system, which has been firstly used at the hard X-ray nanoprobe beamline of SSRF. The BiBEST can then efficiently stabilize X-ray beam position and stability in parallel, making use of different optical systems in the beamline.

BL19U1, an energy-tunable protein complex crystallography beamline at the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility, has emerged as one of the most productive MX beamlines since opening to the public in July 2015. As of October 2023, it has contributed to over 2000 protein structures deposited in the Protein Data Bank (PDB), resulting in the publication of more than 1000 scientific papers. In response to increasing interest in structure-based drug design utilizing X-ray crystallography for fragment library screening, enhancements have been implemented in both hardware and data collection systems on the beamline to optimize efficiency. Hardware upgrades include the transition from MD2 to MD2S for the diffractometer, alongside the installation of a humidity controller featuring a rapid nozzle exchanger. This allows users to opt for either low-temperature or room-temperature data collection modes. The control system has been upgraded from Blu-Ice to MXCuBE3, which supports website-mode data collection, providing enhanced compatibility and easy expansion with new features. An automated data processing pipeline has also been developed to offer users real-time feedback on data quality.

Presented and discussed here is the implementation of a software solution that provides prompt X-ray diffraction data analysis during fast dynamic compression experiments conducted within the dynamic diamond anvil cell technique. It includes efficient data collection, streaming of data and metadata to a high-performance cluster (HPC), fast azimuthal data integration on the cluster, and tools for controlling the data processing steps and visualizing the data using the DIOPTAS software package. This data processing pipeline is invaluable for a great number of studies. The potential of the pipeline is illustrated with two examples of data collected on ammonia–water mixtures and multiphase mineral assemblies under high pressure. The pipeline is designed to be generic in nature and could be readily adapted to provide rapid feedback for many other X-ray diffraction techniques, e.g. large-volume press studies, in situ stress/strain studies, phase transformation studies, chemical reactions studied with high-resolution diffraction etc.

Here, a recently commissioned five-analyzer Johann spectrometer at the Inner Shell Spectroscopy beamline (8-ID) at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) is presented. Designed for hard X-ray photon-in/photon-out spectroscopy, the spectrometer achieves a resolution in the 0.5–2 eV range, depending on the element and/or emission line, providing detailed insights into the local electronic and geometric structure of materials. It serves a diverse user community, including fields such as physical, chemical, biological, environmental and materials sciences. This article details the mechanical design, alignment procedures and data-acquisition scheme of the spectrometer, with a particular focus on the continuous asynchronous data-acquisition approach that significantly enhances experimental efficiency.

VMXm joins the suite of operational macromolecular crystallography beamlines at Diamond Light Source. It has been designed to optimize rotation data collections from protein crystals less than 10 µm and down to below 1 µm in size. The beamline has a fully focused beam of 0.3 × 2.3 µm (vertical × horizontal) with a tuneable energy range (6–28 keV) and high flux (1.6 × 1012 photons s−1 at 12.5 keV). The crystals are housed within a vacuum chamber to minimize background scatter from air. Crystals are plunge-cooled on cryo-electron microscopy grids, allowing much of the liquid surrounding the crystals to be removed. These factors improve the signal-to-noise during data collection and the lifetime of the microcrystals can be prolonged by exploiting photoelectron escape. A novel in vacuo sample environment has been designed which also houses a scanning electron microscope to aid with sample visualization. This combination of features at VMXm allows measurements at the physical limits of X-ray crystallography on biomacromolecules to be explored and exploited.

Conic sections are commonly used in reflective X-ray optics. Hyperbolic mirrors can focus a converging light source and are frequently paired with elliptical or parabolic mirrors in Wolter type configurations. This paper derives the closed-form expression for a mirror-centered hyperbolic shape, with zero-slope at the origin. Combined with the slope and curvature, such an expression facilitates metrology, manufacturing and mirror-bending calculations. Previous works consider ellipses, parabolas, magnifying hyperbolas or employ lengthy approximations. Here, the exact shape function is given in terms of the mirror incidence angle and the source and image distances.

Autonomous methods to align beamlines can decrease the amount of time spent on diagnostics, and also uncover better global optima leading to better beam quality. The alignment of these beamlines is a high-dimensional expensive-to-sample optimization problem involving the simultaneous treatment of many optical elements with correlated and nonlinear dynamics. Bayesian optimization is a strategy of efficient global optimization that has proved successful in similar regimes in a wide variety of beamline alignment applications, though it has typically been implemented for particular beamlines and optimization tasks. In this paper, we present a basic formulation of Bayesian inference and Gaussian process models as they relate to multi-objective Bayesian optimization, as well as the practical challenges presented by beamline alignment. We show that the same general implementation of Bayesian optimization with special consideration for beamline alignment can quickly learn the dynamics of particular beamlines in an online fashion through hyperparameter fitting with no prior information. We present the implementation of a concise software framework for beamline alignment and test it on four different optimization problems for experiments on X-ray beamlines at the National Synchrotron Light Source II and the Advanced Light Source, and an electron beam at the Accelerator Test Facility, along with benchmarking on a simulated digital twin. We discuss new applications of the framework, and the potential for a unified approach to beamline alignment at synchrotron facilities.

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