Physics Professor Leads Development of New 3D X-Ray Diffraction Instrument

Professor Emeritus Robert Suter has a dream: to unite scientists from across the globe with exciting new research tools. Under his leadership, a consortium of scientists, in association with the Advanced Photon Source at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, have begun work on the next era of materials science research: the High-Throughput High-Energy Diffraction Microscopy Instrument (HT-HEDM).

"The concept of building this instrument was planted by Jon Almer of the Advanced Photon Source," said Suter. "He leads the team that runs an existing instrument and came to realize that the demand for experiment time was outstripping what was available there. It was about a year later that I decided to take it seriously and started planning a proposal to the National Science Foundation."

The existing instrument, at beamline 1-ID, uses X-ray diffraction to provide measurements that give researchers a map of what a material's internal structure looks like without destroying the material sample. This three dimensional "X-ray vision" helps to refine models or theories of how materials behave when external conditions such as temperature or pressure are applied. Demand for such knowledge, which yields both fundamental new understanding and will aid in accelerating development of new applied materials, has expanded to exceed current measurement capacity.

To solve this problem, Suter reached out to colleagues Michael Sangid at Purdue University, Ashley Spear at the University of Utah, and Aaron Stebner at the Colorado School of Mines. He felt this group would be a good fit for the project, "based on their work using the existing instrument," he explained. They agreed, and the group developed the proposal and obtained agreement from the four institutions to fund the required cost-sharing. After peer review, the project was funded and the group began work in earnest to get development of the new HT-HEDM instrument off the ground.

The HT-HEDM instrument will be more efficient than its predecessor, while also being capable of taking more sensitive measurements and producing more streamlined analysis. "We have updated various aspects of the original instrument, so this one will be faster and easier to run. Data reduction software will process multi-terabyte data sets and produce output data in as automated a way as we can manage," said Suter. The consortium plans to have the device fully operational by January 2021.

This work is funded by award DMR-1726375 from the National Science Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation program.