HT2 L2: Data Collection at the Synchrotron

HT2: Data Collection

L2: Data Collection at the Synchrotron

Even before the pandemic, most of the beamlines accepting MX proposals were moving towards remote access.  This mode can be intimidating for new users as concerns of “being on your own”, fear of not having enough beam time and wasting precious samples come to mind. During this talk I will walk through the steps and address some of the concerns involved before, during and after your beam time in order to optimizing your results from a synchrotron visit.

The speed  at which MX data can be acquire has been steadily increasing with new brighter sources, better and faster detectors and automatization at the beamlines. One of the most challenging aspect of data collection is actually being able to manage all the information obtained and be able to use it during the visit, while you still have available samples.

A concerted effort amongst facilities, especially in Europe is pushing to converge towards similar web interfaces at beamlines in order to provide a familiar environment to users. Web tools to access data analysis results and meta data are also evolving to catch up with new experiments for MX such as serial crystallography and time resolve crystallography. A better understanding of what is available and how to take advantage of these tools is crucial to harvest as much info from your samples.

Hopefully we will be able to apply some of the concepts reviewed here with some hands-on remote data collections at one or more facilities.