New opportunities for the XMaS beamline arising from the ESRF upgrade program

The XMaS bending magnet beamline at the ESRF has been in regular user operation since the autumn of 1998 and has employed a very simple optical system consisting of a Si <111> monochromator and a toroidal mirror. The ESRF extremely brilliant source (EBS) upgrade program presents the bending magnet beamlines with a series of challenges and exciting new opportunities to extend the range of science performed, with emphasis on in-operando and in-situ studies. Geometrically, the new EBS lattice will move the source for bending magnet beamlines some 3 meters upstream and XMaS will use a newly designed 0.86 Tesla short bend, instead of the present 0.4 Tesla bending magnet. The higher field of the new source increases the available flux at high energies (>25 keV) by an order of magnitude and will result in a smaller brighter beam. To exploit the extended energy range, a dual toroidal mirror system, coated with chromium and platinum, will provide the focusing optics and enable continuous operations from 2.035 keV to 33 keV which will be coupled to a fast scanning LN₂ cooled, constant offset monochromator. We report here on the opportunities presented by the new machine lattice and the solutions chosen to deliver a state of the art beamline that utilizes a very wide range of x-ray techniques including scattering and spectroscopy from a broad spectrum of materials characterization.