Energy Range
2.6-0.52 Aº - 4.6-23 keV
ALBA Synchrotron
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XALOC provides the Structural Biology groups with a flexible and reliable tool to help in finding solutions for structures of macromolecules and complexes.
The beamline copes with a broad variety of crystal sizes and unit cell parameters, and allows both wavelength dependent and independent experiments.
Continuous access to XALOC is available anytime throughout the year, see the users call information page.
Remote data collection is fully operative at XALOC. During 2024, ALBA will also cover the dewar transport for all EU users (only for remote access experiments).
MXCuBE and ISPyB-EXI are already available. Further details and instructions in section 7 of this page.
XALOC supports both Unipucks and SPINE (EMBL/ESRF) pucks, which allow fast sample interchange.
Relevant updates for users
Technical specifications
Photon Energy (Wavelength) range | 4.6-23 keV (2.6-0.52 A) |
Flux at sample | > 2·1012 photons/s/250mA at sample (measured) |
Energy resolution (DE/E) | 2·10-4 |
Beam size at sample (FWHM) | Adjustable 50-300 (H) x 6-100 (V) μm2 |
Beam divergence at sample (FWHM) | < 0.5 x 0.1 mrad2 (HxV) |
The beam size will be fitted to the crystal dimensions by (a) adjusting the focus of the mirrors along the beam path, and (b) having two beamline operation modes: focused and unfocused.
In the unfocused configuration, one or both mirrors are removed from the photon beam path, resulting in a very limited beam divergence, less than 0.03 mrad vertically. This mode can be especially useful for large macromolecular complexes with large unit cell parameters. In the focused configuration both mirrors can focus the beam to 50×6 µm2 FWHM (H×V) on small or microcrystals, while at the same time retaining a small and useful vertical divergence (0.1 mrad). In addition, the mirrors allow variable focusing (de-focusing) if matching the size of the X-ray beam to the dimensions of the crystals, or if focusing at the detector (which can be placed at any distance between 80 mm to 1300 mm from sample) is required. In this case, the beam size at the position of the sample can range from 50×6 µm2 up to 300×300 µm2 (H×V). In order to avoid x-ray beam deformations caused by the optics when defocusing, slope errors of the mounted mirrors have been reduced to 70 nrad RMS and the monochromator crystal can work close to the zero-expansion temperature of Silicon (124 K).
How to download the data
Check out section 4 to access remotely to your experimental data
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Give us your feedback
If you have performed experiments at ALBA, ensure that all your past experimental reports and related publications are uploaded
Access the ALBA User Office Portal