The ESRF is the first high-energy, fourth-generation synchrotron, which constitutes a landmark for fundamental and innovation-driven research. With the support of the ESRF’s international partner countries, a brand-new generation of high-energy synchrotron, the ESRF’s Extremely Brilliant Source (EBS) was launched in 2020 with superior X-ray performances (up to a factor 100) in terms of...
Photon-in/photon-out (PIPO) spectroscopies are increasingly applied in the study of physical and chemical properties of materials to investigate the local electronic and geometrical structure with element selectivity. Herein, PIPO spectroscopies refer to the techniques derived from the combination of X-ray absorption and emission spectroscopies (XAS-XES), such as resonant inelastic X-ray...
The study of Cultural Heritage involves the investigation of what is left of our past (materials) to learn about the immaterial (knowledge).
The subject by definition involves many disciplines such as History, Archaeology, Conservation, Museology, Materials Science, Technology, Anthropology among other, which have their own methodology designed to obtain information relevant to them....
Portland cement (PC), is one of the most manufactured commodity in the world. Moreover, cement industry is one of the major contributors for greenhouse gases emissions. In the fabrication of one tone of PC clinker, about 0.87 tons CO2 are emitted to our atmosphere. There are two main approaches to decrease the carbon footprint of cements. On the one hand, PC can be party replaced by...
Investigation of the magnetic properties of a metal-organic network consisting DCAAQ (N,N'-(anthracene-9,10-diylidene) dicyanamide) molecules coordinated with Co atoms on Au(111).
In recent years, unprecedented amounts of algae from the Sargassum genus have washed ashore on the beaches of the Caribbean1. During their life cycle, these seaweeds accumulate a high concentration of pollutants, especially arsenic (As). They are disposed of by collecting them and then spreading them along shorelines or inland. Their degradation, as well as rainfall, generate leachates that...
Metal iodates form a diverse range of non-centrosymmetric structured materials, which exhibit useful and interesting properties such as non-linear optics; visible to far-IR transparency; large second-harmonic generation coefficients; a high optical damage threshold; and good thermal stability. They have been intensely studied under ambient conditions. In contrast, there remains a large deficit...
Tetradymite α-Bi2Te3 (space group (S.G.) R-3m, centrosymmetric) is well known to be found in a few group-V A2X3 compounds (A=As, Sb, Bi) at room conditions (RC). Under high temperature (HT), this R-3m can be obtained in the In2Se3, the β phase [1], which belongs to the group-III A2X3 compounds (A=Al, In, Ga). A few theoretical works have shown that this β- In2Se3-like structure is stable above...
ESUO, the European Synchrotron and FEL user organization, was founded in 2010 as a body to represent all European photon science users. Today, ESUO is a legal entity that represents about 30 000 users from 31 European member states and European associated countries. The mission of the organization is supporting a thriving European synchrotron and FEL user community with equal opportunities of...
LEAPS – the League of European Accelerator-based Photon Sources – is a strategic consortium of the Synchrotron Radiation and Free Electron Laser user facilities in Europe. Its primary goal is to actively and constructively ensure and promote the quality and impact of fundamental, applied and industrial research carried out at each facility to the greater benefit of European science and...
The continued quest for novel and better catalysts is helped by providing an understanding of the relationship between structure and property. The obvious difficulties to obtain such relationships are on the one hand the complexity of the heterogeneous catalyst and on the other, the demanding conditions under which catalytic reactions are performed. One understandable approach is to make use...
Registering dynamic changes in short- and long-range atomic ordering of solid catalysts under operando conditions, i.e. during catalytic action under relevant operation settings, is essential for the rational development of this important class of functional materials. Synchrotron radiation X-ray absorption (XAS) and diffraction (XRD) techniques allow such studies, the challenge being to mimic...
Here, we show three examples of how XAS techniques are very useful to provide an exhaustive information about the oxidation state and coordination environment of MCs and SACs::
- Pd SACs spontaneously formed after dissolving in neat benzyl alcohols. The gram-scale preparation and stabilization of Pd SACs within the functional channels of a novel methyl-cysteine-based metal–organic framework...
Tracking the active site of catalytic metallic nanoparticles in mandatory for tailoring new catalysts and promote a clean and green environment. The activity of each of the facets of the nanoparticle will differ depending on the orientation and coordination of surface atoms [1], yet isolating their individual activity is typically challenging. Within this context, curved crystals possess...
Ion batteries are a key technology and play a dominant role in today's world [1]. Extensive research efforts have been dedicated to exploring and developing new cathode materials with higher capacities and lifetimes [2].
Recently, a new family of transition metal carbides and carbonitrides called “MXene” has been synthesized with a layered hexagonal structure and Mn+1Xn...
Transition metal driven chemical transformations in organic synthesis offer the promise of new retro-synthetic strategies for generating novel organic compounds. Efforts are continuously being directed at finding unprecedented reactivity for various transition metals in the hopes of developing, new selectivity, catalytic efficiency and sustainability. Recently gold has garnered significant...
Operando synchrotron radiation-based characterization techniques applied to energy storage materials are becoming a widespread characterization tool as they allow for non-destructive probing of materials with various depth sensitivities through spectroscopy, scattering, and imaging techniques. Moreover, they allow for faster acquisition rates, variable penetration depths, higher spectral or...
Selenium (Se) plays a vital role in regulating the metabolic activities in humans as it is needed for the thyroid gland functioning, effective immune response, fertility, and detoxification of free radicals.[1] Unfortunately, the Se content in foods depends on the Se present in the cultivation soil which can be very low in certain regions to satisfy the dietary requirements. Indeed, around a...
A detailed knowledge of the molecular structure of the interface between material surfaces and gases, and of Electrodes and Electrolytes, is crucial for solving fundamental problems in fields like catalysis, wetting, corrosion, electro-photochemistry, batteries and many others. Until now this has been hampered by the scarcity of surface-sensitive microscopy and spectroscopy techniques that...
The main goal of the interdisciplinary and multipurpose Spanish CRG BM25-SpLine beamline at the ESRF is to satisfy the needs of the use of synchrotron radiation in the region of hard X-rays of the Spanish scientific community, with a broad range of interests crossing very different research areas: physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, environmental sciences, and cultural heritage....
Since the discovery of graphene and its impressive properties, the combination of different materials with graphitic systems, such as graphene or graphite, has attracted much attention for different technological applications. Nevertheless, the interface interaction between materials and systems on such nanostructures plays a fundamental role, and can be seen as a direct manifestation of...
Nanomagnetism is nowadays expanding into three dimensions, triggered by the discovery of new magnetic phenomena and their potential use in applications. This shift towards 3D structures should be accompanied by strategies and methodologies to map the tridimensional spin textures associated. Different lab-microscopy techniques like magnetic force microscopy can be used to explore the magnetic...
The bacterial cell wall is an essential gigantic macromolecule that defines the shape of the bacterium and enables the bacterium to resist lysis as a result of its high intracellular osmotic pressure. The main component of cell wall is peptidoglycan (PG) that consists of repeating linear polymers of N-acetylglucosamine (NAG) and N-acetylmuramic acid (NAM) linked together via short oligopeptide...
In recent years the Australian Synchrotron received $94.1 million funding from over 20 stakeholders for the construction of new beamlines. The BRIGHT program will expand the beamline infrastructure of the Australian Synchrotron and will increase both its capacity and capabilities. A Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS) beamline is currently being commissioned as part of the BRIGHT program....
For a long time, rare-earth (RE) intermetallic materials have attracted considerable interest because of their rich and exotic properties including complex magnetic phases, valence fluctuations, heavy-fermion and Kondo behavior and non-Fermi-liquid properties. At the heart of the involved physics is the delicate interplay between itinerant electrons and the lattice of localized 4f...
The current quest for spintronic devices might benefit from taking advantage of the properties of highly perfect materials. For example, spinels are oxides with interesting properties that suggest many possible applications based on them. However, growth defects are ubiquitous in spinel thin films. A possible path to obtain highly perfect spinel nanostructures is through growth by oxygen...
Among the vast number of organic semiconductors (OSCs) developed in the last decades, [1]benzothieno [3,2-b]benzothiophene (BTBT) derivatives have emerged as one of the best performing materials for p-type organic field-effect transistors (OFETS). However, the understanding and control of molecular doping, as a versatile platform for tuning the optoelectric properties of OSCs, remains a...
Injection moulding is the most common fabrication technology used to shape plastics including recycled plastics. In this technique, molten plastic is injected into a metallic mould under high pressure where it rapidly cools to a solid, thereby preserving the shape and it is then ejected from the mould. The high throughput of this technology has led to its widespread use. The properties of the...
Epitaxial Graphene/Ferromagnetic (Gr/FM) structures deposited onto heavy metals (HM) have been proposed for the realization of novel spin-orbitronic devices because of their perpendicular magnetic anisotropy and sizeable Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction, which in turn allow for enhanced thermal stability and stabilization of chiral spin textures [1,2]. In this work we elucidate the nature of...
Time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography (TR-SFX) is a revolutionary scientific-technical breakthrough that makes use of the highly-intense, ultra-short X-ray pulses produced at X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFELs) to study structural dynamics of biological macromolecules in “real time” by using nano/microcrystals under nearly "native" conditions. In our group, we are interested in...
As a promising host-system for novel spintronic applications, magnetic topological insulators (TI, MTI’s) hosting quantized and spin-polarized transport properties are a highly intriguing research topic. Over the recent years, many design approaches, ranging from magnetic surface coverage over dilute bulk doping up to the use of intrinsic magnetic structures have been tried experimentally,...
Stochastic behaviour has traditionally been a limiting factor in developing nanomagnetic technology. Recently, we have shown complex probabilistic, emergent behaviour in interconnected nanowire ring arrays [1-3] that is particularly useful for ‘reservoir computing’ (RC), a highly efficient computation scheme for time domain signal processing [4]. We have also simulated RC with such arrays for...
Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) can exist in different crystalline forms,
demanding a thorough investigation of their solid form landscape during drug discovery. Solvate formation is a common occurrence and in some cases, solvates can serve as intermediates in the production of the optimal form for further development. More challenging is to understand the reason for the formation of...
Graphene (Gr), in its pristine state, is a semiconductor with a zero band gap and massless Dirac fermions carriers, which conduct electrons like a metal. Nevertheless, the absence of bandgap makes it impossible to control the material’s electrons, something essential, for example, to perform on-off switching operations in transistors. Therefore, it is necessary to generate a finite gap in the...
X-ray spectroscopy and scattering allow a unique combination of electronic and structural information to be obtained from a variety of different types of samples in many different forms (solid, liquid, gas). The extension of these methods into the time domain has allowed measurement of dynamic processes, for example the tracking the photoinduced charge carriers in a functional material$^1,^2$...
Nonlinear X-ray wave mixing is a novel area of research that extend the field of nonlinear laser spectroscopy [1] into the short wavelengths regime. Transient grating, a four wave mixing technique, employs two crossed laser beams interacting at the sample to generate an interference pattern. This excitation grating induces dynamics in the sample that transiently changes the index of refraction...
The MID instrument, located in the beamline SASE2 of the European XFEL Facility, has been in operation since 2019. The focus of the MID instrument is ultrafast studies of materials using the High repetition rate and high spatial coherence of the European XFEL accelerator.
The instrument work in a large range of hard x-ray energy ranges from 5 keV to 24 keV. The beam size at the sample...
The interest in copper-indium-sulfide (CIS) quantum dots (QDs), as heavy metal-free nanomaterials, has increased significantly in the past few years. CIS quantum dots (QDs) have been studied for many applications like photodynamic therapy, solar cells, LEDs, and bioimaging [1]. They show exciting optoelectronic properties, such as broad photoluminescence (PL) with a large Stokes shift and long...
The advent of X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFELs) introduced the possibility to study ultrafast phenomena in the X-ray range, with high temporal resolution and unprecedented peak brightness. This has led to the extension of many established methods into the time-domain as well as the development of new photon-hungry techniques XFELs. These advances have also made it possible to take full...
Liquid water is the single most important medium in which highly consequential chemical and biological processes take place. Water is often equivocally regarded as a passive medium. Ranging from an isolated molecule to small clusters and up to bulk, water shows unique and ubiquitous behavior at different temperatures and environments. The main reason is the presence of a strong H-bond...
Understanding the basis of enzyme catalysis at the molecular level has been a fundamental goal of biochemistry and structural biology. The “recording” of an enzymatic reaction as it happens represents a significant challenge because many of the enzyme:substrate/transition-state/product complexes are transients, making them invisible to standard crystallographic techniques. X-ray free-electron...
Providing detailed experimental insights into how proteins change over time and to relate these structural changes to biological function remains one of the major challenges in structural biology. Next generation X-ray sources including diffraction-limited synchrotrons and X-ray Free Electron Lasers offer exciting new opportunities to study protein dynamics by time-resolved pump-probe...
Studying matter under extreme conditions is critically important for a wide range of science application including, for example planetary science, astrophysical high-velocity impacts as well as industrial applications. While laser compression is playing a major role in exploring phase diagrams at extreme condition of pressures and temperatures, the associated physical processes and phase...
Since the last meeting in 2019, ALBA and its user community has not only seen an exceptional successful operation, despite the difficult working conditions due to COVID and other major changes, but had also experienced a dynamic period of growth and changes. With LOREA and NOTOS being in operation and XAIRA, FAXTOR and MINERVA making excellent progress towards finishing the construction phase,...
We will give a broad overview of recent progress in an experimental effort to understand and control collective quantum phenomena and excitations in metal oxides. Resonant x-ray scattering yields essential information about interactions between spin, charge, and orbital degrees of freedom at the atomic scale, and is hence a key tool in this effort. We will focus on recent advances in research...
Significant progress in accelerator design, X-ray optics, detection technology, and Information Technology drives worldwide the evolution of synchrotron light sources to the 4th generation, opening new windows to the exploration of inner details of matter, devices, and their functionality. The ALBA II project, initiated in 2021, will transform ALBA into a 4$^t{^h}$ generation light source, to...
ALBA is working on the upgrade project that shall transform the actual storage ring, in operation since 2012, into a $4{^t{^h}}$ generation light source, in which the soft X-rays part of the spectrum shall be diffraction limited. The project has been officially launched in 2021 and a White Paper presenting the main concepts of the upgrade shall be published in 2022. The storage ring upgrade...
Within the Complementary Plans Program in Advanced Materials, a correlative facility for in-situ experiments directly linked to the ALBA Synchrotron will be soon launched launched in Catalonia. Its aim is to enable correlative in-situ (S)TEM, AFM/STM and Synchrotron Radiation (SR) experiments to address some of the scientific challenges of the European Green Deal plan, and thus promote a more...
ALBA II is a unique opportunity to create together with you a facility which is fit for the research and development needs of the first half of the 21th century. Well aware of the broad base of ALBA’s user community, we used three focus areas, health, energy, and information technology, to analyze the challenges laying ahead of us, to identify the characterization needs, and ultimately develop...
The Life Sciences scientific program at the ALBA synchrotron has been well established for years, with several beamlines covering multiple techniques widely used in structural molecular and cellular biology. Still, as part of the future ALBA-II upgrade, the program is being further developed to offer new techniques. The existing beamlines are planned to undergo throughout upgrades in the...
LOREA (‘flower’ in basque language), the ninth beamline of the ALBA synchrotron radiation source, started its operation in 2021 and is dedicated to electronic structure investigation by means of Angle Resolved Photo-Emission Spectroscopy (ARPES).
The beamline covers the photon energy range of 10-1000 eV, with continuously variable polarization, resolving power of more than 10^4 in...
In the new Alphafold2 era, the interest of structural biologists on macromolecular dynamics has increased. Synchrotron Serial Crystallography (SSX) may still be not so known among crystallographers as single-crystal MX, however, the serial data collection of multiple non cryocooled microcrystals opens the door not only to projects including radiation sensitive targets (as metalloproteins) or...
The new Cryo-electron Microscope Platform possess a specialized cryo-electron microscope for structural biology applications, equipped with an automated sample load system and a last generation direct electron detector Falcon IV. The platform will give access to state-of-the-art cryo-EM equipment for structure determination projects using the latest technology and methods.
This equipment will...
Nanometer-scale textures, such as stripe domains and magnetic skyrmions, are ubiquitous in materials in which interactions compete at different length scales. Remarkably, such textures can exist even in a perfectly homogeneous underlying material. Since their energy is translationally invariant, they can move within the hosting material. It is of great fundamental and applied interest to image...
Owing to the importance of the SAD technique, |ρ|-based direct methods in the form of the recent SMAR (= SM,|ρ|) phasing algorithm incorporating the inner-pixel-preservation (ipp) procedure [Rius, J.& Torrelles, X. (2021) Acta Cryst A77, 489-493] have been adapted to the determination of anomalous scatterers substructures. Their applicability has been tested on a series of...
One of the most common approaches to introduce improvements for graphene future technological applications is the intercalation of atoms or molecules through graphene. Among the different studies that have been done, the intercalation of alkali metals have been proven to be very appealing to engineer the band structure of graphene. In particular, lithium and more recently sodium also stand out...
We have used SAXS to investigate the incorporation of several peptide amphiphiles to vesicles. These modified peptides have been shown to have amphiphilic properties. Vesicles have distinct SAXS features that provide information about the electronic density across the bilayer. We have adopted a multiple Gaussian description of the bilayers using several constrains to keep the number of fitting...
Phase-contrast X-ray imaging uses the refraction of X-rays to generate the contrast. It has been demonstrated to provide superior soft-tissue contrast in comparison to conventional attenuation-based X-ray imaging. However, quantitative imaging of biomedical soft tissue at high spatial resolution and high image quality still remains challenging. Some existing methods require assumptions on the...
The Chemistry and Material (CHEMAT) section is administratively one of the three scientific sections of CELLS-ALBA Experiment Division. It presently encompasses 4.5 operating beamlines (BL04-MSPD, BL11-NCD-SWEET, BL16-NOTOS, BL22-CLAESS and BL24-CIRCE-NAPP) and two laboratories: (Chemistry and High Pressure). Already foreseen is the integration in the section of the new beamline 3sbar...
Scattering techniques have been widely used for studying the structural heterogeneity of soft condensed matter in general and polymers in particular. Simultaneous Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS) and Wide Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) is a well suited technique for investigating phase changes or conformational rearrangements on a length scale ranging from 1 to 500 nm. Static or time...
Our aim was to apply high resolution and precision techniques to investigate the efficacy of gene editing to revert the cellular and biochemical phenotype of cells harbouring collagen VI mutations which give raise to a severe form of Muscular Dystrophy. Soft X-ray tomography can provide new structural and complementary results given that no sectioning is required, thus preserving the...
Li-ion and Na-ion batteries operate thanks to reversible intercalation reactions of the intercalant cation (A = Li${^+}$ or Na${^+}$) with the host compound (A${_x}$H) used as the active material of the positive electrode (often referred as “cathode”). These intercalation reactions typically exhibit two types of reaction mechanisms: (i) homogeneous reactions (single phase or solid solution),...
Cardiomyopathies are serious heart muscle (myocardial) abnormalities which can lead to life-threatening complications such as heart failure, cardiac arrest, and sudden death. Myocardial biopsies obtained from surgical septal myectomies are essential for confirming diagnosis of cardiomyopathies. Owing to the recent advancements of synchrotron radiation-based X-ray phase contrast imaging (XPCI),...
NOTOS at the ALBA synchrotron light source is a beamline devoted to XAS, XRD, and metrology applications in the energy range 4.5 – 30 keV. In addition to the capability to perform XAS and XRD investigations, the beamline will allow combination of XAS and XRD experiments in the same beamtime. NOTOS has been designed to study the electronic structure, short and long range order by XAS and XRD...
Microtubules (MTs) are dynamic filaments involved in many essential cellular functions including those needed for cancer cell growth. Taxanes are MT stabilizing agents and the most successful antitumoral drugs targeting MTs. However, despite their mode of action is the stabilization (i.e., do not destroy the filament structure), they produce a paradoxical neurotoxic effect by inducing axon...
During the last few years, the supercritical fluids and functional materials group (SFFM) at ICMAB, have been researching on the preparation of metalorganic materials using an unconventional technique based on supercritical CO2 technology (scCO2) as solvent.
In the field of coordination polymers and metal-organic-frameworks (MOFs), scCO2 is widely known for being used for the post-synthetic...
Chromium triiodide (CrI3) was the first layered van der Waals material to demonstrate the persistence of a sizable ferromagnetic hysteresis down to the monolayer [1]. This observation was accompanied by a striking transition from a layered ferromagnetic to a layered antiferromagnetic order as the number of layers of the crystal approached the two-dimensional limit [2]. The discovery of...
The study of the three-dimensional behaviour of the magnetisation vector field at the nanoscale is of paramount importance for the magnetism community. The access to this information provides the fundamental information necessary to properly understand the physics and phenomena present in magnetic systems. In general, the actual methodology to study the magnetisation states at the nanoscale is...
High‐pressure and high-temperature techniques are used to strongly modify the atomic interactions of matter while in situ synchrotron X-ray diffraction characterizes the samples. This has enabled reliable experimental studies in a wide range of P-T conditions, like those presented here. Firstly, I will present the results of two $CO{_2}$-loaded pure-silica zeolites where the content of...
Alba synchrotron is going towards an important upgrade, Alba II, impacting the future characterization capabilities offered to the user community. In this framework, the high-pressure program is one of the Alba scientific programs that has to compete with other scientific areas serving wide user community. Thus, it is critical that HP techniques fit in the big picture of Alba II and the...
Molecular magnetism is an emerging field with potential for technological applications as high-density information storage, quantum computing and spintronics.${^1}$ 2D metal-organic networks are of especial interest since they allow the ordering of magnetic atoms in regular patterns. These systems are highly versatile with endless possible combinations of organic linkers and metallic atoms. We...
Poly(lactic) acid (PLA) is a biodegradable biopolymer which suffers from poor mechanical properties and high cost. The addition of polyethylene (PE) introduces a toughening effect which dramatically improves these material properties. Here we report on initial characterization of films produced by blown film extrusion and the re-organization of films as static loads are applied. The...
Magnetization oscillations in thin films with spatial variations at the nano- and microscale are interesting in the development devices for high-speed and low-power signal processing compatible with existing technology. Surface acoustic waves (SAWs) are an alternative to magnetic fields in the excitation and control of magnetization dynamics, which use electric fields in order to induce...
Interfacing materials with different functionalities is an efficient way to manipulate their respective properties and promote the emergence of novel phenomena. Controlling interfacial interactions is however a complicated task in most cases. In that respect, the tunability offered by ligand chemistry in organic materials is an interesting asset that can be exploited at hybrid interfaces...
For the study of thin films and fibres under load, a uniaxial tensile stage has been developed. The stage has been designed with several key features for tensile load experiments at synchrotron-based polarised infrared microspectroscopy endstations. One of the advantages compared to commercial available stages is its compact design (<20 mm thickness) and the large field of view on the sample...
BL06-XAIRA beamline at ALBA synchrotron light facility, foreseen to perform the first experiments by the end of 2023, will be dedicated to microfocus macromolecular crystallography, complying with a long-standing request from the scientific community and complementing the available MX capabilities of BL13-XALOC beamline.
The beamline is designed to support a broad range of biomedical...
XALOC is a tunable MX beamline, in user operation since 2012, located at the 3rd generation synchrotron ALBA (Barcelona). It has been designed to deal with automatable X-ray diffraction experiments of micrometer-sized crystals, including a variety of crystal sizes, unit-cell dimensions and crystals with high mosaic spread and/or poor diffraction. The aim for a reliable all-in-one beamline is...
El abstract se encuentra en el documento adjunto
Find the abstract document in the attachment
Direct digital manufacturing is a family of technologies which enables products to be manufactured directly from a digital definition without the use of specialized tooling or molds. Fused deposition modelling and stereolithography are probably the most common and widely used of these transformation technologies. These have developed out of techniques to rapidly produce prototypes of products...
The relationship between Mn local structure and the polar and magnetic phases of A-site ordered REBaMn2O6 [1-3] and disordered RE0.5Ba0.5MnO3 (RE: La, Nd, Sm and Y) manganites has been investigated combining high energy resolution fluorescence and total fluorescence detected X-ray absorption at the Mn K-edge, to overcome the interference of the RE L-edges [4]. The extended k-range EXAFS...
Ca$_3$Mn$_2$O$_7$ was proposed as a prototypical multiferroic material in which the ferroelectric and the ferromagnetic ground state arise from the same elastic lattice instability, providing an indirect but high magnetoelectric coupling mechanism.[1] In order to further tune the functional properties of this system towards multiferroicity at room temperature, we have applied chemical doping...
The BL31-FaXToR is the new beamline currently under construction at the third generation synchrotron facility ALBA, dedicated to hard x-ray micro-tomography. The beamline will provide the opportunity to perform 3D imaging within sub-seconds time resolution, working under mono- or white-beam conditions. Absorption and phase-contrast (mostly based on free propagation and grating interferometry)...
ALBA is a third generation 3-GeV synchrotron radiation facility built near Barcelona. Since 2012, it serves worldwide academic and industrial users. At the present day its portfolio includes nine operating beamlines, with an additional five, one that will soon enter into operation, and four that are in the design/construction phases, that will expand its capabilities. Among these new...
Iron and Manganese oxides are commonly used to colour and decorated lead glazes since medieval times. Original raw pigments react, dissolve, and recrystallize into new crystalline compounds during firing. Their nature, size and distribution depend on the composition of the pigment, glaze and ceramic ground, method of application and thermal paths. Their presence gives direct information on the...
Applications of natural rubber often involve biaxial deformation, yet most testing of rubber takes place using uniaxial deformation, despite the fact that, biaxial extension provides a more exacting test of theoretical models. In this work, we design and develop a novel equi-biaxial deformation stage which enables in-situ and time resolving small-angle X-Ray scattering and wide-angle X-ray...
Ver documento adjunto.
See attached document.
The epsilon phase of Fe$_2$O$_3$ is a ferrimagnetic polymorph that stands out for a remarkable magnetic anisotropy (K$_u$~2·10$^5$ J/m3) and sizeable remnant magnetization at room temperature (~50 kA/m)[1] making it appealing for applications in magnetic recording and electromagnetic applications in the range of millimetre waves [2]. Moreover, ε-Fe$_2$O$_3$ is also interesting from a more...
Manganese-based (such as MnO2) cathodes have been attracting enormous attentions in aqueous Zn metal battery, thanks to its low-cost, suitable potential and considerable capacity. However, the electrochemical mechanism remains unclear, being ascribed to co-insertion/conversion with Zn2+, Mn2+, H+, or even precipitation of an intermediate products (Zn4SO4(OH)6·xH2O, ZHS), which is retrained by...
Investigation on the preparation of efficient and flexible high temperature superconducting materials (HTS) is one of the puzzles to be solved for the Energy Transition goal. One of the important parts of this development is focused on the cost-effective, scalable methods of synthesis of such materials.
Nowadays, HTS based on REBa2Cu3O7 (RE=Y or Rare Earth, REBCO) are manufactured as long,...
Ferrimagnetic tetragonal Mn-based Heusler compound family Mn$_{3}$G (G=Ga, Ge) has attracted much attention in the last decade due to the strong magneto-crystalline anisotropy along the $c$-axis [1], small magnetic moment [1] and high spin polarization [2], thus standing as a good candidate for non-volatile and efficient high density magnetic random access memories. In this family of...
Our object of study is a human protein anchored at the mitochondrial inner membrane. This protein consists of three domains whose function is still unknown. The N-terminal domain (N) spans through the intermembrane space, whereas the C-terminal domain (C) faces the mitochondrial matrix, both regions being connected by a transmembrane helix embedded in the inner membrane. Several constructs of...
A wide diversity of microorganisms has been recognized to enzymatically reduce toxic selenium forms (SeVI and SeIV) to non-toxic elemental selenium (Se0). The Se0 formed is usually produced in form of nanoparticles (NPs) with a wide array of shapes (spheres, nanorods, nanowires, etc.) structures (amorphous, monoclinic, trigonal, etc.), and sizes, which influence their environmental behaviour...
This study evaluates the use of whole seaweed biomass to obtain bio-based films for food packaging applications in a more sustainable and energy efficient way. To this end, four different species of agarophytes (Gelidium sesquipedale, Gracilaria chilensis, Gracilaria tenuistipitata and Gracilaria verrucosa) were minimally processed by melt blending combined with compression moulding,...
Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are functional materials where the interconnection of inorganic coordination and organic linker chemistries provides a virtually unlimited chemical parameter space to investigate material responsiveness through chemical-structural changes. Their open network structure gives MOFs an extraordinary structural flexibility that often results in a large structural...
Calcium orthovanadates and orthophosphates substituted with various cations attract researchers’ attention because of opportunity of their application in various fields, especially in optoelectronics, biomedicine and in chemistry in connection with their catalytic properties. Parent compounds $Ca_3(XO_4)_2$, X = V or P, are known to crystallize in R3c space group. The unsubstituted...
We present an overview of the status and capabilities of the PhotoEmission Electron Microscope (PEEM) at the CIRCE beamline of the ALBA synchrotron. The PEEM instrument, which can be also used with an electron gun (Low Energy Electron Microscopy (LEEM) and micro-LEED), is a versatile, multipurpose surface and thin film characterization platform. The Synchrotron irradiation (Photon energy and...
Fresco paintings are made of lime or dolomitic mortars [1,2]. The mortars dry reacting with the atmospheric CO2 and produce, depending on their nature, different calcium carbonate polymorphs.
Casein was widely used in antiquity as a binder or glue in different painting techniques. Since the beginning of the 20th century it has also been applied to artwork restoration thanks to its adhering...
Topological insulators (TIs) are materials of particular interest because of their exceptional features stemming from their conducting, topologically protected surface states. The combination of topological properties and magnetic order can lead to new quantum states of matter as the quantum anomalous Hall effect (QAHE) [1]. Recent discoveries as the first antiferromagnetic topological...
The layered perovskite YBaCuFeO5 is considered one of the best candidates to high-temperature spin-driven multiferroics. In RBaCuFeO5 perovskites (R: rare-earth or Y) A-site cations are fully ordered and their magnetic properties strongly depend on the preparation process [1,2]. They exhibit partial cationic disorder at the B-site that generates a magnetic spiral stabilized through...
X ray Resonant Magnetic Scattering (XRMS) was used to understand the magnetic behavior of a 2-dimensional square array of trilayer ellipsoidal disks of submicrometer size (800 nm) deposited on Si. The disks were made of Fe (14 nm)/Al (3 nm)/Co (17 nm) by magnetron sputtering and lithographied by laser interferometry. The experiment was done in MARES end-station, in BL29 at the ALBA...
The Multilayer Monochromator for the BioSAXS beamline at the Australian Synchrotron is intended to provide high monochromatic flux into the experimental station. A vertical bounce arrangement using a single Ru/B4C multilayer stripe will deliver a flux of up to 5 x 10^14 photons/s with a 1% bandwidth off an undulator insertion device. A side clamped water-cooled solution is used to dissipate...
The circularly polarized absorption spectrum of Dy M5 in DyCo4.5 amorphous alloys was decomposed in its spectral components related to transitions to states with the dysprosium angular moment parallel, antiparallel and perpendicular to the applied field [1]. This was done taking advantage of the atomic-like behavior of the 4f electrons, and the fact that, due to their large orbital moment in...
Cubic Rashba effect and 2D-ferromagnetism at the iridium-silicide surfaces of antiferromagnetic GdIr2Si2 and mixed-valent EuIr2Si2
Two-dimensional (2D) electron states at the surface of RT2Si2 compounds (R = lanthanide, T = transition metal) with ThCr2Si2 structure have proven to be ideal model systems for studying the joint action of spin-orbit (SOI) and exchange interactions on...
Antiferromagnetic (AFM) oxide materials in low-dimensional geometries, either in nonmagnetic or magnetic environments, display a rich variety of magnetic behavior. They are very interesting materials to investigate the fundamental physics of finite-size effects in magnetic systems. Despite the limited applications in current technology, AFM oxides are important reference and model systems for...
We would welcome the opportunity to take part in the presentation abstract session to highlight “The benefits of Open Data”.
Using Photon and Neutron (PaN) sources to investigate samples of matter at molecular or atomic level apply to extremely diverse science domains, ranging from chemistry and life science to palaeontology and art history. The scientific community represented by PaNOSC...
In the actual paradigm, where it is possible to grow magnetic nanostructures with 3D magnetization configuration, more complex structures appear, such as vortexes, skyrmions or hopfions. In order to visualize these new configurations, new magnetic imaging techniques different from the conventional 2D approach are mandatory. With X-ray Magnetic Circular Dichroism (XMCD) in X-ray transmission...
