A new experimental station for simultaneous X-ray microbeam scanning for small- and wide-angle scattering and fluorescence at BESSY II

A new instrument for simultaneous microbeam small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering and X-ray fluorescence (SAXS/WAXS/XRF) is presented. The instrument is installed at the microfocus beamline at BESSY II and provides a beam of 10 mm size with a flux of about 10(9) photons s(-1). A SAXS resolution up to 500 angstrom d-spacing and a range of scattering vectors of almost three orders of magnitude are reached by using a large-area high-resolution CCD-based detector for simultaneous SAXS/WAXS. The instrument is particularly suited for scanning SAXS/WAXS/XRF experiments on hierarchically structured biological tissues. The necessary infrastructure, such as a cryo-stream facility and an on-site preparation laboratory for biological specimens, are available.