From 9th to 27th January, a team from the German company FMB Feinwerk- und Meßtechnik GmbH in Berlin that was awarded the contract for construction of HESEB, the Helmholtz-SESAME Beamline for soft X-ray spectroscopy, together with SESAME’s team, installed the complete front-end and optics of the beamline at the ID 11 port of the SESAME ring.
In 2019, five research centers of the German Helmholtz Association, DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron), FZJ (Forschungszentrum Jülich), HZB (Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin), HZDR (Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf), and KIT (Karlsruher Institut für Technologie), joined forces to implement a new, state-of-the-art soft X-ray beamline at SESAME. The HESEB project is being generously funded to the order of 3.5 M€ by the Initiative & Networking Fund of the Helmholtz Association.
The source will be a refurbished BESSY-II UE56 APPLE-II undulator provided by HZB.
HESEB will be the first soft X-ray beamline at SESAME and will significantly expand the research capabilities available to the user community in the Middle East and neighbouring regions. The undulator’s ability to provide linearly to circularly polarized light makes the beamline very suitable for materials science applications, especially magnetic materials. Its plane grating monochromator uses exchangeable gratings to cover a photon energy range from 70 eV to 2000 eV.
The optical design of HESEB has two branches in the monochromatic beam for two independent experimental end stations. One, that has been designed and produced by the HESEB team, allows for X-ray absorption and fluorescence studies. In a special configuration, an X-ray capillary is used to focus the beam further, e.g. for micro-XANES, and also to study samples in the Helium atmosphere which is required for the investigation of delicate items such as those in cultural heritage research.
The second, to be designed and constructed by Turkey in a project led by the Turkish Energy, Nuclear and Mineral Research Agency (TENMAK), will result in a Turkish soft X-ray PhotoElectron Spectroscopy (TXPES) beamline.
Installation of the HESEB beamline consists of four main phases: the delivery and installation of the front-end and beamline components, just completed by the FMB and SESAME teams; installation of the undulator, which is expected to arrive at SESAME next month; and machine testing and commissioning of the beamline and HESEB end station by SESAME’s team, which is to start in April. This will bring SESAME’s fourth beamline into operation.
A time-lapse video of the HESEB installation is below: