First users on Diamond's 18th beamline

On Wednesday 27^th April, the first researchers arrived on the latest experimental station to become operational at Diamond.

The group from the University of Hull are studying metal nanoparticles, which they produce by mounting metals such as gold and platinum on cellulose and cellulose acetate. 

The new experimental station (B18) offers X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS), an established technique providing essential element specific information about the local atomic geometry and the chemical state of the absorbing atom. B18 has been built as a world-leading general purpose, but easy to use beamline that will add significant weight to Diamond’s spectroscopy capabilities. A collaboration with STFC staff during the design allowed many of the more advanced optical components and detectors from the previous synchrotron facility, the SRS at Daresbury, to be incorporated, helping to rapidly bring the beamline into operation. Its arrival brings the number of operational beamlines at the facility up to 18 and gives researchers the opportunity to do extremely high quality X-ray Spectroscopy, a technique that has grown up alongside the dedicated synchrotron science facilities that can now be found across the world. The beamline has exciting potential for a range of fields with chemistry topping the list of research areas that stand to benefit from its capabilities.

Having just seen the first set of experimental data from his group’s experiment, Dr Nigel Young, Senior Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Hull, said:

Nigel continues, “In science today, there is intense interest in the properties of materials with nanosized dimensions and advances in the area are already bringing new developments to society. Silver nanoparticles, for example, are now being used in wound dressings as they have an antibacterial effect on the skin. Others can act as catalysts. What we are doing with these experiments is scoping out what can be made and investigating how gold and platinum particles of varying sizes behave and interact with the cellulose or cellulose acetate. X-ray Spectroscopy is particularly useful when you have low concentrations of metal nanoparticles, which are hard to detect with X-ray diffraction. Experimenting with the concentrations may well uncover new properties and possibilities in terms of applications so having a tool like B18 here in the UK is very exciting for scientists working on nanoscale science.”

For more information on Diamond’s beamlines, including B18, visit www.diamond.ac.uk/B18