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
Ensure you have had a meeting or have made contact with BL staff to discuss your needs for upcoming experiment.
What energies do you require
If you are bringing your own rig:
What are the dimensions of the rig
Footprint and total height
Height of sample in the beam
If there is containment - thickness
What is the in-situ weight of the rig
What are your power requirements
What cables are required - lengths and types
If you have control or measuring equipment
What is the footprint of this equipment
What cables are required
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 HDD 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. The usual size of diffraction data collected during 3 days at I12 can be 500 GB; the size of tomography data collected during 3 days at I12 can be several TB or more. Due to the large size of tomography datasets, particularly from time resolved experiments, we recommend remote data transfer to your university via Globus.
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.