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The beamline

The MFX beamline as four areas you can jump to: the three stages the beam passes through, plus the controls that drive them and the resources they draw on. Design-phase.

The beamline divides into two kinds of thing. Along the beam, in order, sit the three stages: the Source that delivers and conditions the beam, the Optics and endstation stage where the beam is focused and meets the sample, and the Detector that records each shot. Cutting across all three are the shared concerns: the Controls that drive the hardware, and the resources the beamline draws on. Two access-gated zones contain it: a shared front-end / transport zone (the FEL source, solid attenuators, offset and transport mirrors, the PPS stopper, transport diagnostics) and the MFX experiment hutch (conditioning optics, sample delivery, spectrometer, detector). pcdshub records which beamline-line zone each device is in, but not which access-gated hutch or its safety meaning (ENC-1).

The stages are containment trees of apparatus (Asset.parent_id); controls relate to that apparatus sideways; and a resource is a Supply in its own right.

Stages

  • Source: the FEL source and its pulse-energy gas detector, then the shared front end and X-ray transport. The transport mirrors are where one source is steered to one instrument at a time, the switched-source seam (TOPO-1).
  • Optics and endstation: the MFX hutch. The pulse picker, solid-Si attenuator, diamond channel-cut mono, focusing lenses (transfocator + prefocus), slits, and per-shot diagnostics condition the beam; the pump-probe laser, the liquid-jet sample delivery, and the von Hamos emission spectrometer sit at the interaction point.
  • Detector: the per-shot area detector, read not by a poll loop but by the event-driven DAQ.

Shared

  • Controls: the pcdshub EPICS stack (with the real PV prefixes), the EventSequencer beam-synchronous timing, and the event-driven DAQ that CORA references but does not own.
  • Resources: the continuously-available supplies a run needs (the FEL photon beam, cooling water, vacuum); carried in the descriptor, with no operations page in this design phase. The FEL beam is a shared, switched resource (TOPO-1).

Reference

The cross-cutting view that spans every area:

  • Inventory: the full planned CORA Asset model (every device by parent_id, with Families, the pcdshub control handles, and pending confirmations).
  • Model: the architectural gap register, the real product of this XFEL exercise.