Shift summary 07.09.2023

Achievements:
1. found t0   on LSCO x=0.15 at pre-peak O K edge
2. fluence dependence at dt = 130fs, laser-on-off XAS => laser power at 50%
3. static XAS on the three samples x=0,.15, .4 aorund the pre-peak
4. setting for pump-probe: 1.1 MHz 520 pulses at 100% Transmission, PPL at 50%

Problems: 
10:10pm loss of optical sync on PP laser. realized before starting time-resolved experiments. coarse timing requried !

Program for the night shift:
reestablished timing
resume experimetns, i.e. time-resolved signal on sample (XAS) then start time-resolved RIXS.
 

• Improved the alignment procedure:
  • Using the pin to make sure of the spatial overlap
  • SAXS signal is used to make sure the pin is well centered on the X-ray beam path
  • YAG is only used in combination with ILM to fix with ~5 um precision the height of the beam (moving CRLs on laser focus) and the temporal overlap.
• Recording of the different laser foc planned to be used during the experiment: no aperture, 40 mm, 25 mm, 15 mm diameter

Note:

• Jet failed a couple of time
• We lost the Sync system for 2 hours, got it back again for 30 min, then lost it again

• Data taken from 11 to cryo failure
• Beam conditions stable
• Timing scan for different energy
• Operation stopped after cryo failure
• Cryo jet was heated up then
• Improvements of optical diagnostics (far field monitor)

X-ray delivery

• 0.5 mj, improved to 1.1 mj xray energy in the evening

Optical laser delivery

• 50 fs, 860 nm as fundamental wavelength, 188 kHz
• ns for illumination,

Achievements/Observations

• Aligned the instrument to 9.3 keV
• Aligned the PPL laser
• Time zero PPL
• Measured sample, dark runs, including testing different sample conditions (filtered vs not filtered or lower cutoff)
• Measured TR-SFX

Issues

• Low xray energy, BKR improved it afternoon, from 0.5 to 1.1 mj, hopefully we could still get better the following days
• PP-laser AMPHOS issues
• The focus at IRU in the evening had issues, we had to redo the alignment partially. We also had to ask BKR to improve the beam alignment at FEL imager.

X-ray delivery

• 1.1 mj, 564 kHz, 93 pulses, stable delivery

Optical laser delivery

• 50 fs, 860 nm as fundamental wavelength, 188 kHz
• ns for illumination,

Achievements/Observations

• Lots of data collection for TR-SFX
• Tried many samples and optimazation

Issues

• Beam fluctuation aorund 23 : 00
• Low hit rate. tried to improve, better than before.

X-ray delivery

• 1.1 mj, 564 kHz, 93 pulses, stable delivery

Optical laser delivery

• 50 fs, 860 nm as fundamental wavelength, 188 kHz
• ns for illumination,

Achievements/Observations

• Lots of data collection for TR-SFX

Issues

• Sample was accumulated on catcher and strong diffraction was observed, need to vent chamber and clean it, but it happned end of beamtime, we decided to finish experiment 

Achievemnets

• Characterized the X-ray and laser danage on the STO2LNO2

Problems

• Cound not find fine timeing from XAS measurements performed on the sample
  • MCP sees 266 nm PP laser
  • SiN mesaurement not successful so far. It is possible that there is an issue with the SN membranes on the sample holder

Plan for next shift

• Find fine timing
• conclude damad sutdy of sample.

X-ray delivery

• 7 keV, 202 pulses, 564 kHz, ~1.3 mJ, stable delivery

Optical laser delivery

• None

Achievements/Observations

• Collected a few NQO1 runs (no mixing) in Adaptive and FixedMG with the Ros setup, good diffraction
• Difficult to reach droplet synchronisation

Shift summary from Monday 18th 7am until Saturday 7am

MONDAY

• Aligned beamline until the beamstop. Macro for recovering mirror positions worked well. Minimal fine tuning required.
• Changed energy to 8.4 keV to align spectrometes on Ni kalpha emission.
• Characterized focal spot of the x-rays at interaction point via edge scans. Focus of ~4 um as requested by users.
• Aligned all laser imaging systems to the interaction point

TUESDAY

• Verified the xfel photon energy with the HED spectrometers. The energy was off by 30 eV. Tuned the energy for real 7.9 keV, in the BKR screen appears as 7.87 keV
• Beamline transmission scans. Focusing CRLs in the optics hutch give 55% transmission. This means from the 700 uJ from XGM1 we get around 250uJ at the interaction point (accounting also for ~75% transmission through the mirrors)
• First ReLaX + X-ray test shots. Fine tuned some timings, filtering on the Streaked Optical Pyrometry, etc...
• Cancelled night shift, due to no X-rays on Wednesday. Usually at this point we would align targets over night and shoot them during the day.

THURSDAY

• Beam was not exactly at the same position at the XFEL imager as Monday. We needed to recheck the beamline alignment and overlap of all our beams at the interaction point. (We need to overlap in a 5x5 um2 beamspot.
• Rechecked the X-ray energy. This time it was 110 eV off. The BKR number is 7.79 keV for real 7.9 keV.
• Further checkes on spatial and timing overlap.
• Essentially, we could recover the conditions from Tuesday evening at Thursday late afternoon.
• Late evening: uTCA1 stopped working We switched the Mastertimer to uTCA2 waiting for an opportunity on Friday to solve it. We also observed an issue with an outdated trainId from the PPU being stored in the DAQ. We contacted DOC for both issues.
• Late evening, series of laser shots to estimate the optimal laser conditions for the experiment.
• First full data sequence collection.

FRIDAY

• We are in data collection mode. Aligning targets and shooting them.

SATURDAY

• Power glitch at 6:50 am on Saturday morning. HED is minimally affected, beam goes down
• Beam comes back after ~1hr, but down again 30 mins later due to MPS issue (only for SASE2) which requires a server "DIXHEXPS1.3" to be reset, which could not be located.
• Simultaneously SASE2 karabo broker has pile up issues resulting in extreme latency. DOC begins to work on the problem and the whole SASE 2 topic goes down, services do not reappear. We are informed that this may require a restart of the whole broker.

During the morning shift (7am - 3pm), we couldn't take any meaningful data due to the issue of power glitch which caused the beam permission error (AIBS) and down of SASE2 Karabo / Online-GPFS due to the lack of cooling in the rack room.

During the late shift (3 pm - 11 pm), after these issues were solved thanks to PRC/DOC/ITDM/EEE at 5 pm..., we could get back in operation relatively quickly. Although there were a bunch of issues here and there (most of the devices needed to be instantiated and recover the correct parameters, loss of XGM, DAQ issue etc), Theo (XGM) and DOC helped us promptly.

Fortunately, the x-ray axis was not changed much. The beam was still exactly on the FEL imager cross. After the recovery of M2/M3 feedback (needed to recover the correct parameters which was a bit of time consuming though), the beam correctly went to the HED popin cross. The beam height at the sample location was about 30 um off in height. The temporal synchronization between the x-ray and laser was changed to about 4 ps compared to that of the morning. 

We started taking data at ~ 9 pm. Since then, until the shift handover at 11pm, users could acquire data very smoothly. They will continue acquiring data with the night shift (11pm - 7 am) members. 

X-ray delivery

• 7 keV 202 pulses 1.6mJ stabel across train and throughout the shift
• Beam down at 7am again, power glitch same as yesterday

Achievements/Observations

• faster changover and alignment
• YAG on nozzle worked
• collected data the droplets in oil sample delivery method - many good hits observed
• still working on the synchronisation with the x-ray pulses

Summary for sept., 23rd

6:55 SPB just handed the beam over to FXE when the power glitch killed the interlocks and brought down ACC

11:30 After a lot of communication with PRC, Wolfgang Clement and DOC, the beam is back in SA1. We request change to 5.5 keV

• It took most time to get the AIBS recovered
• Interlock was reset by Wolfgang Clement on-site
• Pandora X-05 in SXP hutch had no power, but recovered after TS restored power in SA3

12:30 We finished alignment and collected some user data (XRD)

16:00 Failure of the optical laser shutter in ILH. Seems not operational.

• Adhoc procedure is being established to circumvent the faulty laser shutter (coordinated with SLSO, LSO, GL and Management)

18:00 FXE is able to take user data again (XAS)

23:30 Beam handed over to SPB (thanks for the extra time to finish a promising measurement)

7:00 Power glitch during SPB operation - they were supposed to hand the beam back at 7:30h

• Power glitch brought down FXE interlock system with beam stop monitor alarm that could not be reset
• SA1 PPL running fine, seems unaffected

9:10 Beam back in SA1, but still at 7 keV and cannot be changed by BKR to the req'd 5.8 keV, 94 kHz.

10:00 Beam back with FXE at req'd photon energy

Collected pump-probe diffraction and XAS data for the user expt. No further issues.

Shift summary for 26.9.2023

X-ray delivery

• 6.3 keV, ~4 mJ, 1-352 pulses at 1.13 MHz
• Great performance and stable delivery with few minor interruptions

Optical laser delivery

• See issues

Achievements/Observations

• Aligned MKB trajectory to 1.5m detector distance configuration
  • Some work can still be done on the background
• Scattering laser setup
• A few runs with silver cubes taken at the end, with some time borrowed from FXE
• Good focus with MKB B4C strip

Issues

• Optical laser not available
• Historical data from some devices unavailable in Karabo. Solved by DOC

Shift summary for 27.9.2023

X-ray delivery

• 6.3 keV, 3-4 mJ/pulse, 1-352 pulses at 1.13 MHz

Optical laser delivery

• PP laser, 1030 nm, 226 pulses at 1.1 MHz, delivered from 9:45 on and was stabilizing over the day
• ns laser for rayleigh scattering, stabe delivery

Achievements/Observations

• Aligned MKB trajectory and optimzed background
• Scattering laser aligned with X-rays references and overlaped with particle beam
• Few runs with sucrose while trying to optimize injection

Issues

• PP laser was still drifting in energy and pointing, better stabilized towards the end of the shift
• Difficulties with injection, tried sevral times and did not improve much
• Slope in pulse energy along the pulse train, up to 40% change from first to last pulse
• Significant background AGIPD after correcting beam trajectory

Shift sumary for 29.9.2023

X-ray delivery

• 6.3 keV, 3-4 mJ/pulse, 1-352 pulses at 1.13 MHz

Optical laser delivery

• PP laser, 1030 nm, 226 pulses at 1.1 MHz, stable delivery
• ns laser for rayleigh scattering, stabe delivery

Achievements/Observations

• Solved the issues with sampel injection
• Collected data without laser for 1 to 2 hours
• PP laser coarse timing

Issues

• Issues with injection, solved later in the shift
• Difficulties to find fine timing
• Issue with migrating data to offline cluster, solved by DOC

# Late shift summary 29.09.2023

Laurent, Phuong
## Achievements
- Continue tr-RIXS
- Laser fluence scan
- Check PPL 266 nm power
- Setup DAMNIT

## Problems:
- online analysis not displayed on gui1 server fixed by DOC

## Plan for the night:
- continue tr-RIXS
- monitor energy and position drifts

X-ray delivery

• 6.3 keV, 3-4 mJ/pulse, 1-352 pulses at 1.13 MHz

Optical laser delivery

• PP laser, 1030 nm, 226 pulses at 1.1 MHz, stable delivery
• ns laser for rayleigh scattering, stabe delivery

Achievements/Observations

• Solved the issues with sampel injection
• Collected data with laser 30 min
• PP laser time zero aligned

Issues

• IRU_Slit4 was in position to the beam
• It took time to aling all slits to reduce the scattering in low q

X-ray delivery

• 6.3 keV, 3-4 mJ/pulse, 1-352 pulses at 1.13 MHz

Optical laser delivery

• PP laser, 1030 nm, 352 pulses at 1.1 MHz, stable delivery
• ns laser for rayleigh scattering, stabe delivery

Achievements/Observations

• Several tens of datasets were collected using two different laser polarization (0 degree and 45 degree)
• During the data collections PP laser phase shifter delay scans were used.
• PP laser time aligned to zero and spatial overlapped was checked.

Issues

• The cross talks between SASE-1 and SASE-2 was more than it expected.
• Beam position, pulse energy as well as intra-train pulse energy were varrying. (BKR managed to solved it before the evening)