A laser-aided prealigned pinhole collimator for synchrotron x rays

Abstract

A pinhole small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) instrument was constructed at the SUNY X3A2 beamline, National Synchrotron Light Source, Brookhaven National Laboratory. The three pinholes were mounted in a thick-walled stainless steel pipe and prealigned by using a portable laser source and a charge-coupled device (CCD) area detector. After the prealignment, incorporation of the collimator to the synchrotron x-ray source required only maximization of the incident x-ray intensity passing through the pinholes, which could be done easily by using a scintillation counter after proper attenuation. The entire synchrotron SAXS instrument setup took only a few hours even without stepping motor control for the pinhole collimator unit. By combining this collimator with a CCD-based x-ray area detector which could be assembled by using commercially available components, the SAXS instrument showed good performance for structural scales up to an order of 100 nm. The CCD-based x-ray area detector used a computer- (or manually) controlled intensified unit with a variable gain setting in order to accommodate the changing x-ray flux and to protect the detector from over exposure, a necessary feature for operation of an area detector at a synchrotron light source.