A fancy new detector is being developed by the Swiss Light Source. This Pilatus detector would be of special interest in pushbutton machines, for its range in count rate would allow the use of this detector in a beamstop-less system.
Imagine a SAXS machine without a beamstop, and how convenient it would be, and it quickly becomes apparent that this would much simplify the operation and measurement requirements for samples. The advantages I can quickly think of are:
– no more beamstop alignment, 1 less set of x,y motor stages
– immediate determination of the beam center
– two-step determination of the primary and secondary beam intensity, greatly simplifying the required procedure for determining the sample attenuation/transmission factor, as well as the primary beam intensity in absolute units.
If it works as advertised, this detector could thus greatly simplify the SAXS technique.
Soon I’ll post a simple drawing of an example pushbutton machine.
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