News
August 2009
The VESPERS Quarterly Summary has been issued, along with accompanying Figures.
March - April 2009
An Interim Report on the X-ray Spectra Acquired on the VESPERS Beamline has been issued.
January 2009
Happy New Year!VESPERS Beamline has recently been mentioned in the CLS business team newsletter: Innovision. Read “An Analytical Workhorse for Industry”
December 2008
A link to a video demonstrating collection of XRF spectra while simultaneously viewing it in Science Studio in the user work area at VESPERS.
October 2008
Useful XRF spectra are being collected using white or monochromatised x-rays that are confined to a 20 micron spot on the ample by an aperture. This latter is being used in place of the soon-to-be-available K-B mirrors
Linear and fitted log "white light" spectra of an impure sample of iron, collected for 20 seconds with our single channel Vortex detector
Lead-zinc mineral specimen collected for a similar time again with "white light". Such spectra have been able to be fitted using Quartx Imaging Xone software that is being adapted especially for VESPERS. The mono with a 1.6% bandpass multilayer in position has been used to collect spectra using different exciting energies
A linear XRF spectrum of a nickel alloy collected using exciting radiation near 11kV
The high resolution setting (0.01% bandpass) on the VESPERS monochromator (twin Si(111) crystals) has been used to collect quite good XAS spectra from a copper foil (above). The photon flux for the 9 KeV beam used for this measurement was found to be 7x E9 photons/s. This value is virtually identical to the flux value calculated in 2006 in the original Preliminary Design Report. Thus, alignment of the beam through the entire optical path seems to be good.
Special software is being written for VESPERS with the expectation that most users would eventually wish to control and collect data from their home location rather than traveling to Saskatoon. This software called "Science Studio" has already been tested by users in London controlling XRF scans on VESPERS.
Despite the encouraging data and no major setbacks, the way forward to a complete beamline has been slower than we would have liked. By year end, we hope to have a raster scanning sample stage and working K-B mirrors that will allow some XRF-focussed user projects in the first quarter of 2009. We hope for some XRD data being produced in the following quarter.
July 2008
Recent XAS spectra
September 2007
