BioSAXS

EMBL – in cooperation with scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht – has developed a concept of a SAXS beamline oriented towards biology/soft condensed matter. It will provide a wide range of spatial resolutions from 2000 nm to 0.1 nm and operate in the energy range from 4 to 20 keV. The focal spot on the detector will be 0.2 (horizontal) *0.06 (vertical) mm. The expected flux on the sample will be in the order of 10¹³ at wavelength resolution 3 *10^-4 (double crystal monochromator) and of order of 10¹⁵ at wavelength resolution 1*10^-2 (pink beam or multilayers).

Currently the detailed design of the instrument is discussed (Fig. 1), the contribution of Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht will be the construction of the detector platform and the detector tube with the option for automatically changing of sample-to-detector distance. Upon operation of the beamline Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht will be in charge of 15 % of the total beam time. This will be supported by personnel of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht and by contribution to the operation costs. Beside soft matter experiments aiming at the users visiting our SANS instrumentation at GEMS a strong focus will be on the bio-membrane related research which complements the protein and DNS focussed work performed at EMBL.