Speaker
Description
Since entering user operation during ALBA phase I, the NCD-SWEET beamline has established itself as a high-performance and versatile platform, providing SAXS, WAXS, GISAXS, and GIWAXS capabilities to a broad scientific community. The beamline supports a wide range of in situ and operando experiments through flexible sample environments and enables correlative workflows with complementary X-ray and microscopy techniques. Building on these strengths, the ALBA II upgrade will significantly expand the beamline capabilities while preserving its flexibility.
The transition to the ALBA II diffraction-limited storage ring will deliver substantially higher brightness, coherent flux, and source stability, enabling coherence-based methods, multimodal experiments, improved sensitivity for weakly scattering samples, higher spatial resolution, and faster in situ and operando measurements.
To fully exploit these opportunities, NCD-SWEET will undergo a comprehensive instrumentation upgrade, including new X-ray optics, a high-precision sample positioning system, and next-generation hybrid pixel detectors with smaller pixel size, higher frame rates, and negligible dead time. Moreover, the SAXS detector will be integrated into a motorized in-vacuum flight tube, enabling shorter sample-to-detector distances and extending the accessible q-range while increasing the data quality.
These developments will preserve the beamline versatility while significantly boosting its performance and extending its scientific reach towards high-throughput scattering, multimodal experiments, coherence-enabled techniques, and increasingly demanding in situ and operando studies. This contribution presents the current status of NCD-SWEET, the technical roadmap towards ALBA II, and the new opportunities that the upgraded beamline will offer to the user community.