Beamline

There are specialized devices and equipment on the beamline that are used for producing, maintaining, monitoring, and accelerating the particle beam.

A typical application for this kind of beamline is crystallography, although many other techniques utilising synchrotron light exist.

The differences will depend on the type of insertion device (which, in turn, determines the intensity and spectral distribution of the radiation); the beam conditioning equipment; and the experimental end station.

A typical beamline at a modern synchrotron facility will be 25 to 100 m long from the storage ring to the end station, and may cost up to millions of US dollars.

The beamline elements are located in radiation shielding enclosures, called hutches, which are the size of a small room (cabin).

This is enforced by the use of elaborate safety systems with redundant interlocking functions, which make sure that no one is inside the hutch when the radiation is turned on.

Devices along the beamline which absorb significant power from the beam may need to be actively cooled by water, or liquid nitrogen.

There are ray-tracing codes such as Shadow and McXTrace that treat the x-ray beam in the geometric optics limit, and then there are wave propagation software that takes into account diffraction, and the intrinsic wavelike properties of the radiation.