The Materials Science beamline upgrade at the Swiss Light Source

The Materials Science beamline at the Swiss Light Source has been operational since 2001. In late 2010, the original wiggler source was replaced with a novel insertion device, which allows unprecedented access to high photon energies from an undulator installed in a medium-energy storage ring. In order to best exploit the increased brilliance of this new source, the entire front-end and optics had to be redesigned. In this work, the upgrade of the beamline is described in detail. The tone is didactic, from which it is hoped the reader can adapt the concepts and ideas to his or her needs.

Spatiotemporal stability of a femtosecond hard-x-ray undulator source studied by control of coherent optical phonons

We report on the temporal and spatial stability of the first tunable femtosecond undulator hard-x-ray source for ultrafast diffraction and absorption experiments. The 2.5-1 Angstrom output radiation is driven by an initial 50 fs laser pulse employing the laser-electron slicing technique. By using x-ray diffraction to probe laser-induced coherent optical phonons in bulk bismuth, we estimate an x-ray pulse duration of 140+/-30 fs FWHM with timing drifts below 30 fs rms measured over 5 days. Optical control of coherent lattice motion is demonstrated.

Characterization of Eimeria species. I. Isolation and study of pathogenicity of a pure strain of Eimeria perforans (Leuckart, 1879; Sluiter and Swellengrebel, 1912)

Eimeria perforans was isolated in pure strain by utilizing specific biological characters and specific-pathogen free rabbits. The purity of this strain was demonstrated by measurements of oocysts, derived from a line, started by infection from a single oocyst. The parasite, when inoculated in large numbers, causes a mild disease response for only about two days.