Preparing for Beamtime

Congratulations! To make your experimental time as productive as possible, some forward planning is necessary. This page will help with preparing a successful experiment.

As soon as you receive a successful result from the panel, the User Office will be in touch via UAS. UAS will help guide you through the necessary information you will need to supply in preparation for your experiment. Please do fill this in by the deadlines given as this smooths the way through to your experiment.

If you are aware of any impending time conflicts or other problems that may make your experiment harder to schedule, including a significant change to your experimental method or the absence of a team member, please notify the beamline team as soon as possible.

Please check over the details of your experiment in consultation with the Technical Specification pages of the beamline (Transmission SAXS, Microfocus SAXS, GiSAXS, USAXS, or SAXS Tensor Tomography), as well as the details of available sample environments. Peripheral laboratory facilities are described on the Support Facilities pages of this site.

Also to help prepare for beamtime SEDL is available for integration of Sample Environments or checking connectivity/saftey of User kit. Please contact Paul Wady in the first instance.

Diamond technical staff will need at least 4 weeks' notice of any modification or custom sample design, including mounting adapter plates to our standard M6 25mm pitch breadboard, brackets, and sample cells. We can help with simple machining only. If this will be necessary, please discuss this with your local contact as soon as possible. 

If you haven't already discussed your experiment with your local beamline contact, please get in touch 1-2 months before your scheduled beamtime. They will need to know:

• the camera length and energy you'll need (we provide a summary table) or the size of the feature you're interested in.
• what form your sample will take (liquid, powder, tissue, etc) and how your sample will be mounted (capillary, liquid cell, DSC pan, etc).
• whether you are using one of the SAS beamline sample environments.
• whether you are bringing any kind of custom sample holder or sample environment, and what its dimensions and mounts are.
• what your needs in the peripheral lab will be, particularly if you require a larger piece of equipment such as a glove box or any additional consumables such as gas bottles or specific chemicals.

• Make plans to take your data home. We strongly recommend you bring an USB2 or 3 compatible portable hard drive for use with our Data Dispenser. Make sure this has enough capacity. We recommend at least 100 GB per day of your experiment unless you are carrying out mapping experiment, then your requirements might be considerably higher! Speak to one of the beamline team. Please do not use exFAT format.
• Finalise travel arrangements with the User Office, and verify accommodation has been reserved.
• Watch the safety video off site and take the quiz online!
• Double check the safety forms and make sure that all the samples you are bringing to site are listed on it.
• Get some rest! If you're new to synchrotrons, beamtime can be very intense, especially over several days.
• Let your local contact know if any of your experiment details have changed or you need anything else.