Energy-Recovery Linacs (ERLs) are proposed as drivers for hard x-ray sources because of their ability to produce electron bunches with small, flexible cross sections and short lengths at high repetition rates. Cornell University has pioneered the design and hardware for ERL lightsources. This preparatory research for ERL-lightsource construction will be discussed.

Mesoporous nanomaterials have attracted widespread interest because of their structural versatility for applications including catalysis, separation, and nanomedicine. We report a one-pot synthesis method for a class of mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) containing both cubic and hexagonally structured compartments within one particle. These multicompartment MSNs (mc-MSNs) consist of a core with cage-like cubic mesoporous morphology and up to four branches with hexagonally packed cylindrical mesopores epitaxially growing out of the cubic core vertices.

A fast, high-spatial-resolution detector for high-energy microscopy work is presented. The detector uses a 2160 × 2560 CMOS chip for fast framing (up to 100 Hz in full-frame mode), coupled by a fiber optic taper to a scintillating Terbium-doped fiber optic plate for excellent stopping power even at high energies. The field of view is 7mm × 8.6mm with a resolution of 9 microns. The sensitivity is 1 e-/X-ray at 35 keV, with a read noise of 2.5 e-/pixel.

An X-ray pixel array detector (PAD) capable of framing up to 1 kHz is described. This hybrid detector is constructed from a 3-side buttable, 128×128 pixel module based upon the mixed-mode pixel array detector (MMPAD) chip developed jointly by Cornell and Area Detector Systems Corporation (Poway, CA). The chip uses a charge integrating front end for a high instantaneous count rate yet with single photon sensitivity. In-pixel circuitry utilizing a digital overflow counter extends the per frame dynamic range to >4×107 X-rays/pixel.

We have developed calibration and data processing techniques optimized specifically for photon-integrating pixel array detectors (PADs). Primary effects to be calibrated are pixel gain variation and pixel area variation. Gain variations originate in pixel electronics and may be corrected for via a multiplicative factor. In contrast, area variations result from doping inhomogeneities in the sensor diode, which induce lateral fields that disturb the path of charge carriers as they traverse the diode, resulting in variation in the area mapped to each pixel, depending on the X-ray energy.

New sources and detectors are allowing scientists to look at matter with finer spatial and temporal resolutions. These experiments can produce data that are a series of severely Poisson limited snap-shots of randomly oriented samples. An extreme case of this is destructive imaging of single particles with an X-ray free-electron laser-many frames are needed for a reconstruction, but there is no a priori information associated with the frames about particle orientation.

High-pressure cryocooling has been developed as an alternative method for cryopreservation of macromolecular crystals and successfully applied for various technical and scientific studies. The method requires the preservation of crystal hydration as the crystal is pressurized with dry helium gas. Previously, crystal hydration was maintained either by coating crystals with a mineral oil or by enclosing crystals in a capillary which was filled with crystallization mother liquor.

A proposed design for a reconfigurable x-ray Pixel Array Detector (PAD) is described. It operates by integrating a high-end commercial field programmable gate array (FPGA) into a 3-layer device along with a high-resistivity diode detection layer and a custom, application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) layer. The ASIC layer contains an energy-discriminating photon-counting front end with photon hits streamed directly to the FPGA via a massively parallel, high-speed data connection.