New Science at Materials Imaging and Dynamics (MID) End-Station at European XFEL Facility

The world’s most powerful x-ray source, European X-ray Free-Electron Laser (European XFEL) facility, had been successfully guided the first x-ray laser beam into the SASE1 (SPB/SFX: Single Particles, clusters, and Biomolecules & Serial Femtosecond Crystallography, FXE: Femtosecond X-ray Experiments) experiment hutches in June 2017. About one year later, another two soft x-ray beamlines belong to SASE3 (SCS: Spectroscopy and Coherent Scattering, SQS: Small Quantum Systems) received the first x-ray flashes. In December 2018, the last of the currently planned European XFEL instruments, High Energy Density (HED) and the MID instruments welcomed their first beam. The European XFEL has the extreme performance such as a high repetition rate (currently 1.1 MHz, but maximum 4.5 MHz), a high peak (5 × 1033) & averaged (1.6 × 1025) brilliance*, which can be achieved due to a superconducting linear accelerator operated at 2 K.

The MID end-station is one of the lastly activated instruments and currently preparing an operation phase. The MID has two distinguishing strengths, various measurement geometries and pumping sources. It can provide small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) & wide-angle x-ray scattering (WAXS) geometries, and large field of view geometry for crystallography type experiments together with various pumping sources, such as pulsed lasers (1030 nm, 800 nm and their higher orders), a pulsed magnet (max. 15 T), x-ray split-delay line (SDL: max. 800 ps time delay), and so forth. We are also preparing a nano-focusing system with a Be (Beryllium) compound refractive lens (CRL) of which focus size can be theoretically squeezed down to 50 nm. We strongly believe that the MID instrument may open up a way to explore new scientific areas.

*unit: photons/sec/mm2/mrad2/0.1%bandwidth