What is a beamline?
Beamlines are placed at tangents to the storage ring to guide narrow beams of light to experimental stations where the light is focused for use in experiments. Each beamline is optimised for a particular type of experiment, but all beamlines have three main sections – the optics hutch, where the X-ray beam is filtered and focussed, the experimental hutch, where the light interacts with the sample being studied, and the control cabin, where users control the experiment and collect data. Beamlines typically have three hutches, l-r control cabin, experimental hutch, optics hutch. Watch an animation of a beamline.
