The small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) facility at Duke University will be the first X-ray scattering instrument in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. It will therefore serve a multidisciplinary community of researchers and provide the opportunity, for the first time, to train students in advanced scattering techniques.
The SAXS facility at Duke University's Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility (SMIF) will serve three major universities in the area: Duke University, North Carolina State University, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It will also be available to two historically black universities, North Carolina A&T State University, and North Carolina Central University, that currently utilize instrumentation at SMIF. The instrument will serve researchers in materials science, structural biology, polymer and colloidal chemistry, chemical and biomedical engineering, and textiles engineering. The instrument capabilities will be broad to address the different needs of the users, and include wide angle X-ray scattering (WAXS) and grazing incidence small angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS).
With the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award Prof. Zauscher (PI), and Co-PI's, Dr. Mark Walters (Duke, Director of the Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility), and Profs. Bob Rose (NCSU) and Sergei Sheiko (UNC) acquired Small Angle X-Ray Scattering (SAXS) Instrumentation, and established the Triangle SAXS facility at Duke University’s Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility (SMIF). The Triangle SAXS facility serves researchers in the ΔMRSEC, in materials science, structural biology, polymer and colloidal chemistry, and chemical and biomedical engineering at the four Research Triangle universities. Two, complementary, state-of-the-art instruments have been purchased and installed in May 2013: a slit-collimated SAXSess MC2 from Anton Paar (Austria), and a point collimated GANESHA 300XL+ from SAXSlab (Denmark) (Figure 1). The SAXSess MC2 instrument has very high flux at the sample and is optimized for scattering from solutions. The GANESHA 300XL+ is fully automated to cover a broad q-range, and will be used for SAXS, MAXS (medium angle X-ray scattering), WAXS (wide angle X-ray scattering), and GISAXS (grazing incidence X-ray scattering) measurements. The SAXS instruments are operated and maintained within the operational framework of Duke University’s Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility (https://smif.lab.duke.edu). SMIF operates as a multidisciplinary shared use facility, and is available for research and education to Duke University researchers from the various schools and departments as well as to external users from other universities, government laboratories, and industry. The SAXS instruments also contribute to a fertile training environment in the Research Triangle area. The first user’s meeting was held in March 2013. An inaugural Triangle SAXS Workshop was held May 14-17, 2013, with presentations by the instrument manufacturers and a plenary lecture held by Prof. Findenegg from TU-Berlin. Dr. Richard Gillilan, Senior Research Associate at the CHESS BioSAXS beamlines, has agreed to present a workshop on processing scattering data from biological samples, later in the year.
