A synchrotron beamline for delivering high purity vacuum ultraviolet photons

Abstract

We report on the current status and performance of the toroidal grating monochromator beamline at the Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory (Laboratorio Nacional de Luz Sincrotron). This beamline provides photons in the vacuum ultraviolet and soft x-ray regions from 12 to 330 eV with three interchangeable gratings. We report on the improvement, which allows the possibility of choosing the light polarization degree from linear to almost circular. Here, we also describe the development of a new apparatus, namely, the mirror-inserted harmonic attenuator and calibrating-device with a long length (MIRHACLLE). All beamlines based on diffraction gratings suffer from the problem of high harmonics contaminations to some extent. The MIRHACLLE provides a way to efficiently suppress high harmonics from 25% to 1 ppm in a grazing incidence bending magnet beamline. Its principle of operation relays on the absorption of the high energy photons in a gas phase region. It allows negligible high harmonics contamination for photon energies ranging from 12 eV to the gas first ionization threshold, 21.6 eV, in the case of neon. We also demonstrate the possibility to use this device for energy calibration and resolution evaluation together with any experiment needing its filtering capabilities. The device is also very cost effective compared to other filters presented previously in the literature.