The design and performance of beamline BL16XU at SPring-8

Abstract A new X-ray undulator beamline has been designed and constructed by an industrial consortium of 13 companies at SPring-8. The beamline, named BL16XU, is intended for the characterization of various materials developed for industrial purposes and, together with its sister bending-magnet beamline (BL16B2), has been open to user experiments since the autumn of 1999. The new beamline provides high-brilliance synchrotron radiation in the energy range from 4.5 to 40 keV from an X-ray undulator of the in-vacuo type. The beamline has an experimental hutch for the performance of several experiments: e.g. microscopic observation of materials and micro-fabricated devices by using X-ray beams that have spot sizes of 1 μm or less; X-ray diffraction experiments on thin films with nanometer-scale thickness by using an ω −2 θ diffractometer; fluorescence X-ray analysis of trace elements on Si wafer surfaces by using a total reflection fluorescence X-ray analysis system equipped with wavelength- and energy-dispersive detectors.