Present status of high flux beamline (BL40XU) at SPring-8

High flux beamline (BL40XU) was designed to use very high X-ray flux in various experiments. The X-ray source of BL40XU is a helical undulator and the fundamental radiation can be altered from 8 to 17 keV by changing its gap. Two water-cooled mirrors are located in the optics hutch. After focusing horizontally and vertically by these two mirrors, the X-ray is introduced into the experimental hutch. At the sample position, the focused beam size is 250 tm (horizontal) x 40 mum (vertical) (FWHM) and the flux is estimated to be 1 x 10(15) photon/s. As a detector, a fast CCD camera combined with an X-ray image intensifier with a short-decay phosphor is installed. The framing rate of the fast CCD camera is 290 frame/s (with frame size of 640 x 480 pixels, 10 bits) and up to 5000 frame/s is achieved by reducing the size of the frame. BL40XU was open for public use from April 2000, and various experiments that require high X-ray flux have been carried out. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.