The Integration Of Beamline Automation Software And Instruments And The Development Of Experimental Techniques On SSRF MX Beamline

The phase-I macromolecular crystallography beamline at Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility is designed to a high performance beamline.It helps on the structure determination of proteins by crystallography method.It is an important platform for the structure research field in China now.To take the advantage of the optical and hardware performance of the beamline,the control and data acquisition system needs to be high integrated with user-friendly interface.Currently the control and data acquisition system is also an important element as the hardware components at the beamline.Owing to the open and collaboration of the EPICS community,the EPICS environment is widely applied at almost all the synchrotron radiation facilities.The lower level control and the data acquisition in the end-station adapted the EPICS applications same as the phase-I beamlines.The interfaces offered by EPICS are very suitable for the beamline staff to commissioning.While for the users from biology background,these kind interfaces are not convenient and fully functional.The control system for the MX beamline should combine a frontend that is easily understood by users and a backend to unify the hardware resources distributed across a network.The Blu-Ice/DCS from SSRL is the first and best candidate because its comprehensive tabbed user interface which configured for the MX data collection.Based on the original version Blu-Ice,EPICS is integrated by the epics gateway service.To improve the automation,many functions are developed,such as the coordination of the undulator gap and the double monochromator,the automation of the goniometer,the fluorescence scan and the data analysis,the integration of the sampler robot.This SSRF version Blu-Ice/DCS control system is successfully operated at the first MX beamline at SSRF.The intuitive interface and the unit of the distributed hardware make the system high efficient and reliably.Currently the important trend in the MX beamlines is the implement of the micro-diffraction.The micro-collimator is a vital device to offer the mini-beam on standard MX beamlines.To obtain the mini-beam at BL17 U,a micro-collimator which based on the pinhole is developed and tested.This device let the users select the different beam sizes very quickly.On the other hand,the high frame rate detector reduces the experiment duration substantially.Mini-beam with more flux is necessary for the micro-crystallography.The compound refractive lens(CRL)is employed to focus the beam down to 10 microns with the flux gain.The data collection with these two different mode mini-beams is executed and analyzed.