MAPPING DEVELOPMENTS AT DIAMOND

Many synchrotron beamlines offer some form of continuous scanning for either energy scanning or sample mapping. However, this is normally done on an ad-hoc beamline by beamline basis. Diamond has recently embarked on an ambitious project to define how to implement continuous scanning as the standard way of doing virtually all mapping tasks on beamlines. The project is split into four main areas: 1) User interfaces to describe the mapping process in a scientifically relevant way, generating a scan description that can be used later; 2) The physical process of scanning and coordinating hardware motion and detector data capture across the beamline; 3) Capture of the detector data and all the associated meta-data to disk, deciding and describing the layout of the file (or files) for the main use cases; 4) Display and analysis of live data and display of processed data. In order to achieve this common approach across beamlines, the standard software used throughout the facility (Delta Tau motor controllers, EPICS, GDA and DAWN), has been built on.