Operational statistics are a good way of getting insight on the health of the lab. Let’s take a look at how the MOUSE did in 2024 and compare this to previous years. This is the first year we have not been able to further increase the efficiency, landing in third place in the rankings…
In 2024, we put a lot of effort into changing the machine again, with, amongst others:
- considerable effort by Anja on putting together a broadly applicable methodology for grazing incidence X-ray scattering,
- the visit of Moeez, who helped write EPICS IOCs for a few of the instrument components,
- the breakdown and subsequent replacement of the downstream slit block in autumn, which led to
- the comprehensive changeover from SPEC to EPICS for the main instrument control in winter.
This changeover also meant that we had to change our scripting and data processing. December was spent trying to get at least the measurement collection back on track, and January and February to iron out the bugs and get the data processing mostly operational again.
That puts 2024 at almost 60% efficiency, with a significant effect observed of the breakdowns and subsequent fixes towards end-of-year (Figure 1). With the instrument in this continued heavy use, the toll of time is starting to show on the components.
Last year, I feared that there would be a dramatic slump in productivity due to the reduction in full-time staff supporting the MOUSE. This slump has so far fortunately been mild, partly thanks to
- the increased use of the instrument for grazing incidence efforts by Anja,
- because the automation efforts from the last five years have paid off, and
- because I am still measuring through the 1200 metal-organic framework samples to build up the database.
While the slump is not as bad as I initially feared, the effects are clearly visible also in the other metrics: number of samples measured and number of (peer-reviewed) MOUSE-papers published (Figure 2).
Some of these metrics, such as papers published, will lag behind current events as we are still seeing mostly papers published from one- to two-year old projects. That means the effects of the resource hit on this particular metric may well continue over the coming years, though we are writing furiously to output more papers as well.
Nonetheless, with the heaviest instrument changes now behind us, the improvements should start paying off next year. Many of the bugs have now been ironed out of the new instrument operation methods, and we are again able to measure for days if not weeks on end. With the new Bluesky-ready backend infrastructure in place, we can set our minds to exploit the newly enabled functionality, and hopefully run some amazing experiments in the process.