New high-brilliance small angle x-ray scattering beamline, BL-15A2 at the photon factory

The new high-brilliance small angle X-ray scattering beamline BL-15A2 at the Photon Factory has been operational since late 2014. BL-15A2 has a short-gap undulator, which can produce high brilliance X-rays ranging from 2.1 keV to 15 keV. The experimental hutch in BL-15A2 contains two types of diffractometers. One diffractometer is for grazing incidence small angle X-ray scattering using tender X-rays and the other is for standard SAXS utilizing hard X-rays. Here the beam performance and the diffractometer using hard X-rays in BL-15A2 are reported. The photon flux at the sample position with a size definition slit of H 0.6 mm × V 0.6 mm is 2.03×10¹¹ photons/sec at an X-ray energy of 10.2 keV, which is the 7th harmonic of the short-gap undulator. The beam size at the sample position is H 0.55 mm × V 0.09 mm (FWHM) at a camera length of 150 cm. The camera length can be changed from 25 cm to 350 cm. Simultaneous SAXS/WAXS experiments can be also conducted in BL-15A2. The hybrid pixel detector PILATUS3 2M is installed for SAXS, while PILATUS3 300 k-W can be used as a WAXS detector. The small-angle resolution at a camera length of 350 cm and an X-ray energy of 5.7 keV is 483 nm. Thus, the large hierarchical and seamless structural analysis from the sub-micrometer to angstrom order can be performed in BL-15A2.