A successful collaboration and a new instrument for Diamond Light Source

January 12th, 2010

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The team involved with RASOR

(PhysOrg.com) -- On Friday 8th January 2010 Diamond became the proud owner of a new instrument that will enhance the capabilities of the facility’s surface and interfaces research village, enabling more complicated

The Reflectivity and Advanced Scattering from Ordered Regimes end station, or RASOR, as it is known, is a soft X-ray diffractometer that enables scientists to study strongly correlated electron systems by directly probing their magnetic, charge and orbital structures. This area of research can potentially provide a fundamental basis in the pursuit of a new generation of electronic data storage equipment, such as ultra-fast memory devices.

Provided for Diamond through a collaboration between the University of Durham, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and Diamond itself, funding was awarded to Co-Principal Investigators on the project, Prof. Peter Hatton (Durham) and Prof. Gerrit van der Laan (STFC/Diamond), through a facility development grant to design and construct RASOR. The project was driven by Dr Tom Beale, Post-Doctoral Reseach Associate with Durham University and STFC, who has been in charge from inception to successful commissioning.
During the official handover ceremony at Diamond, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Durham, Prof. Chris Higgins, congratulated everyone for delivering a successful project, before handing over to Prof. Gerd Materlik, CEO of Diamond, who thanked those involved for their hard work and spoke about the importance of collaboration and scientific advancement.

RASOR is a multipurpose end station that can be used for both diffraction and reflectivity techniques. It will initially be installed on Diamond’s Nanoscience beamline (I06), before moving to its permanent home - the Beamline for Advanced Dichroism Experiments (BLADE, I10), which is currently under construction. Upon its completion and installation at Diamond, Prof. Hatton is delighted with the results.

Commissioning of RASOR took place in the autumn of 2009 with the first X-ray beam in the instrument in October last year. The first scientific results were collected soon after by Dr Beale, successfully demonstrating both reflectivity and diffraction techniques. Based at the Diamond synchrotron, Prof. van der Laan, is pleased with the project.

Provided by Diamond Light Source