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4. Preparing for your beamtime

4. Preparing for your beamtime

Owned by Liam Perera
Last updated: Dec 12, 2024
2 min read

For general logistical information about coming to Diamond, including accomodation and transport please go to these pageshttps://www.diamond.ac.uk/Users/Experiment-at-Diamond.html or contact the user office

Beamtime Preparation

  1. Ensure you have had a meeting or have made contact with BL staff to discuss your needs for upcoming experiment.

  2. What energies do you require

    1.  

  3. If you are bringing your own rig:

    1. What are the dimensions of the rig

      1. Footprint and total height

      2. Height of sample in the beam

      3. If there is containment - thickness

    2. What is the in-situ weight of the rig

    3. What are your power requirements

    4. What cables are required - lengths and types

    5. If you have control or measuring equipment

      1. What is the footprint of this equipment

      2. What cables are required

    6. Do you require any specialised mounting

Lab Access

Samples can only be prepared in local support labs. No samples should be stored in the control cabin. Lab access and any extra equipment needs to be requested when submitting your session on UAS.

Data Transfer and Storage

Typical visits on DIAD can reach 20+ TB of data. This includes all raw and processing intermediate files that you do not necessarily need to take with you. Data is stored on disk for 40 days after the end of your beamtime. It is then archived onto tape permanently. It can be recovered from tape using ICAT (https://icat.diamond.ac.uk/ ) however the file structure is difficult to navigate and their is a 10 TB limit for each data package. Multiple packages can be restaged but this can be time consuming.

We recommend bringing enough HDDs for your visit. Prepare your portable hard drives for saving a copy of your data. Only hard drives without password protection, formatted under Linux or Windows (excluding exFat) can be used.

A typical visit can generate on the order of 5-15 Tb of data. This includes all raw and processed data. You may choose to only take one of the two to save space.

At full resolution a typical tomography (4000 projections) can be around 60 GB, which once reconstructed brings the total to 120 GB (for raw+ reconstructed).

On the day

Users are expected to arrive at 9 am on the first scheduled day of their beamtime unless discussed with BL staff. Depending on the scale and complexity of the experiment, the morning is allotted to testing energies for user samples. Once the beamline is configured to the chosen energies it cannot be changed. The beamline is then aligned and both beams are registered, which can take up to 5 hours. We aim to hand over the beamline to the user in the evening of the first day. Please be prepared for this.