The Control and Data Acquisition System of the Neutron Instrument BIODIFF

The Neu­tron in­stru­ment BIOD­IFF is a sin­gle crys­tal diffrac­tome­ter for bi­o­log­i­cal macro­molecules that has been built in a co­op­er­a­tion of Forschungszen­trum Jülich and the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty of Mu­nich. It is lo­cat­ed at the re­search re­ac­tor FRM-II in Garch­ing, Ger­many, and is in its com­mis­sion­ing phase, now. The con­trol and data ac­qui­si­tion sys­tem of BIOD­IFF is based on the so-called "Jülich-Mu­nich Stan­dard", a set of stan­dards and tech­nolo­gies com­mon­ly ac­cept­ed at the FRM-II, which is based on the TACO con­trol sys­tem de­vel­oped by the ESRF. In fu­ture, it is in­tend­ed to in­tro­duce TANGO at the FRM-II. The Image Plate de­tec­tor sys­tem of BIOD­IFF is al­ready equipped with a TANGO sub­sys­tem that was in­te­grat­ed into the over­all TACO in­stru­ment con­trol sys­tem

First test of detectors at theinstrument BIODIFF

The BioDiff instrument at the FRM II has seenthe installation of its two detectors. A neutronscintillator with CCD-camera detector serves asauxiliary detector to perform crystal alignmentand fast measurements with smaller solid anglecoverage. The main detector, a neutron imageplate with online read-out covers a somewhatlarger solid angle of ca. 2π. Whereas the imageplate detector could not yet be tested withneutrons so far first neutron measurementsconducted with the CCD-detector have beenperformed and will be presented here. Theinstrument is intended for neutron proteincrystallography and is a collaboration betweenthe Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) and theForschungs-NeutronenquelleHeinz Maier-Leibnitz (FRM II)

The high-intensity reflectometer of the Jülich Centre for Neutron Science : MARIA

MARIA (magnetism reflectometer with high incident angle) is a world class vertical sample reflectometer dedicated to the investigation of thin films in the fields of magnetism, soft matter and biology. The elliptical vertically focusing guide allows one to measure small samples with a typical size of 1 × 1 cm very efficiently. The double-bounce polarizer and the in situ pumped 3He SEOP (spin-exchange optical pumping) neutron spin filter cell for analysing the polarization of the reflected neutron beam can be moved into the beam in seconds. The polarized flux of MARIA amounts to 5 × 107 n (s cm2)−1 at the sample position with a horizontally collimated beam of 3 mrad, a wavelength of λ = 4.5 Å and a wavelength resolution of Δλ/λ = 10%. In the non-polarized mode a flux of 1.2 × 108 n (s cm2)−1 is achieved in this configuration. MARIA is also capable of grazing-incidence small-angle neutron scattering measurements, using a pinhole collimation with two four-segment slits and an absorber that prevents the focusing of the elliptical guide in the vertical direction