Speaker
Description
The high X-ray flux at fourth generation synchrotron facilities enables high quality data acquisition with short detector integration times. Experiments whose durations were previously dominated by detector integration are thus increasingly dictated by the time required for motorized motion. In particular, experiments performed in a step-wise fashion — where motion is stopped during each integration — suffer from significant motion dead-time due to repeated acceleration/deceleration between each step. For this reason, interest in continuous scans — where detector integration occurs during motion — has grown within the synchrotron community. Precise synchronization is however required in order to ensure data acquisition at the desired positions. These synchronization demands can be particularly challenging in multi-dimensional scans involving multiple moving components.
Here we present a hardware orchestrated, multi-dimensional, continuous scan implementation based on the IcePAP motion controller. Both motion control & detector triggering are orchestrated by the IcePAP hardware, resulting in high precision synchronization. Arbitrary motion trajectories — in up to 128 degrees of freedom — & trigger patterns can be implemented. Scan configuration & initiation is performed in software by the Sardana orchestration suite backed by the Tango control system. The implementation has been demonstrated to yield significant experimental time savings compared to equivalent step scans.
