Experimental Station

ForMAX’s experimental station is currently in design, manufacturing, and installation phase. In order to provide flexibility in terms of different experimental techniques, it will consists of the following main components:
  • Two beam conditioning units, including slits, beam diagnostics equipment, and two sets of compound refractive lenses to achieve either a larger or smaller beam spot at the sample position. 
  • A sample table with a 200 mm vertical translation range and a 200 kg load capacity.
  • A motorized detector gantry, that allows the user to move the WAXS detector and tomography microscope in and out of the x-ray beam path.
  • A 9 m long, evacuated SAXS flight tube, with a SAXS detector inside on a motorized XYZ trolley.
The experimental station is an in-house design, tailored to the specific needs of ForMAX’s user community.

Detectors:
ForMAX is equipped with a number of state-of-the-art detectors:
  • An EIGER2 X 4M SAXS detector from Dectris.
  • A specially designed Lambda 3M WAXS detector from X-Spectrum, with a hole in the center to pass through the direct beam and the SAXS signal.
  • A dual-camera tomography microscope from Optique Peter. The CMOS cameras are still to be purchased.

Sample manipulation:
Dedicated sample stages for different experimental techniques:
  • A modular stack of sample stages for tomography experiments from Lab Motion.
  • Modular stacks of sample stages for different types of SWAXS experiments.