Introduction

The IDEAS beamline is fundamentally indented to be a flexible, general purpose beamline for in-house science, educational outreach and supporting instrumentation and experimental design and development within the facility. 

IDEAS is a basic bending magnetic beamline on port 08B2-1 of the Canadian Light Source, a 3rd generation synchrotron.  The beamline is of a simple design with a constant beam height double crystal monochromator providing an energy range of 1.8 keV – 14.4 keV using InSb(111) and Ge(220) crystal pairs. XRF, XANES and EXAFS can be performed in air and in vacuum, with the available ion chambers and silicon drift detector. 2D maping with sub-millimeter resolution can be prefeormed in air, on large samples up to 90 mm x 200 mm. IDEAS uses an implementation of the in-house developed Acquaman software suite for powerful, user-friendly data acquisition and management.

IDEAS recently underwent an up upgrade to add a  white beam focusing mirror that can either collimate or focus the beam entering the monochromator.  The resolution and flux density were both significantly improved. In addition, a multilayer pair is now available to install in the monochromator for high flux, fixed 8 keV light.  A second endstation designed by IBM for semi-conductor surface science research will be temporarily housed at the beamline until construction of its final home in the Brockhouse sector of the Canadian Light Source is completed.

IDEAS beamline is indented for in-house and special request access and is not open to general users.

Basic Beamline Specifications

IDEAS XRF/Spectroscopy endstation

A  Hitachi Vortex ME4 SDD with FalconX electronics  is the primary florescence detector for the beamline for XRF spectroscopy as well as florescence mode XANES and EXAFS. It is optomized for tender and the lower end of the hard X-ray spectrum with 4 0.5 mm thick sensors each with 65mm² active area (collimated to 50mm²) and 12.5 μm Dura Be windows.

Ketek AXAS-M (M5T1T0-H80-ML5BEV) Silicon Drift Detector using an XIA DXP Mercury pulse processor is available, but has been largley retired.

Three FMB/Oxford ICSpec ion chambers are available for transmission mode XANES and EXAFS.  The chambers can be flushed with a controller mixture of helium, nitrogen and argon.  A pump-purge manifold filing system is under development.

 A multi-sample stage is under development to increase productive and allow for automation of basic, repetitive measurements.

The in-air sample stage has a ~100 mm x 200 mm travel range, and can be set up to accomodaite a wide variety of sample form standard 30 mm x 40 mm PTFE sample holders to complex in-situ sample cells.

The sample stage can be configured for 2D XRF mapping using the KETEK detector.  A focused beam is not available but slits can be used to cut the beam down as small ~500 um x 500 um with reasonable results.

A rough vacuum chamber is available for lower energy “tender” X-ray spectroscopy in florescence and transmission, with a 150 mm travel sample stage. 

Specially designed sample holders are available for mounting 54 13 mm pressed pellets (commonly used with FTIR instruments).

Custom sample holders can be designed and 3D printed upon request.  Contact beamline staff.

Additional Configurations/Endstations

IDEAS can be configured to accommodate other techniques and endstations as needed and is currently hosting the commissioning of a highly automated IBM surface science end-station which can perform X-ray diffraction and scattering measurements, four point resistance probes and rapid thermal annealing. Once completed, the endstation will be moving to the Brockhouse X-ray Diffraction Sector here at the CLS.