 Hello everybody. As mentioned yesterday, my name is Judy Fustin. I am a SANS instrument scientist at the ESS building the SANS instrument Loki, which is a soft matter materials and bioscientists, bioscience focused instrument. So as far as I understand, you've just had a lecture this morning on kind of the background behind performing a measurement, how to set up or how to prepare for a measurement, setting up a measurement, and also a little bit on kind of putting together a proposal application. The purpose of this talk or this lecture is to focus quite specifically on the sample environment. So we're a bit gifted with SANS. There's a multitude of different sample environments we can use to control the conditions of our our experiments and quite a lot of complementary techniques that can also be performed. This lecture is in no way an exclusive list of sample environments. I think it's important to keep in mind that the flexibility is really as much as your imagination and your finances can allow. Sample environment. So as you've heard previously, the instrument, so for example, I've put a little sketch of the Loki instrument, so the Loki SANS instrument at the ESS on the bottom here. We have our neutron beam coming in from the right hand side. We have our different collimation sections, which then go into like a little room. We call it the sample area where our samples are actually positioned on the sample table. And then obviously the neutron beam comes in, hits the sample, it scatters and detected in this detector area. It's within this sample area here, which is user-user will interact with the most, right? So we open a big shielding door, we go in, we set up our samples, we set up the sample environment, we play with the different setup parameters that we have, we close the door, we go back and control the experiment. So from a user perspective, this is our most important area. And what's important about our sample environment? Well, they allow us to control both the position of our samples and the conditions to which our samples are in, in the neutron beam. With this in mind, there aren't, as I mentioned, an absolute multitude of different sample environments available. I just put them into two classes for this talk. The off-the-shelf variety. So these are sample environments that we can, for the most part, go into a cat log, or we have them so well designed in the so frequently used that we can more or less just recopy a design and use it again. Oh, we have our more custom built sample environments. So these are sample environments that a user team, a scientific team or, say, an instant scientist or collaboration thereof, have come up with an idea. They've come up with potentially a preliminary design and then they thought, okay, I want to build this. So they've gone about either getting national or international funding for my collaborations to get the money to support this. These projects are typically on the order of a year or a couple of years long, not undergoing prototype experiments and development. But I'll get into them a little bit more or a couple of examples of these type of custom built sample environments in the second half. So starting off, we're going to go through our standard sample environments, aka our off-the-shelf variety. To begin with, we'll discuss the sample cells. So when I say sample cells, these are the cell holders, the individual cartridge or kind of the body's holder for each individual sample that you want to measure, whether that be a series of protein concentrations, a series of polymer concentrations, a series of gels, a series of different magnetic samples. In order to put them in the sun's beam line, you need to hold them in some way. So things to consider before we select what type of cell we're going to put our sample into. Say if it is an aqueous sample or, say, for example, as proteins, as I mentioned, polymers, as factants, etc. A couple of things you want to consider, how much hydrogen is in my sample. If it's a lot of hydrogen, I might be worried about my incoherent background. If my sample is particularly concentrated, I might be worried about multiple scattering effects. These are all things that can reduce the resolution of the scattering data that I measure, not resolution, but reduce the quality of the scattering data that I measure, making it harder to interpret. So oftentimes, these are things that you need to consider even before you make the measurement yourself to try and reduce these types of effects. Another kind of practical aspect is my sample easy to pipette. I'll show you in a minute, when we look at sample cells, oftentimes we need to pipette from our sample container into a small glass vial, and that's not possible with super viscous. If it's a film, it might be hard to fit into a glass vial, or is a material just as solid and we shouldn't be trying to pipette it or get it into a glass vial of toil, in which case we have to look at even more basic sample holders. Also, something to consider is actually how much sample do you have. Oftentimes, I would absolutely never suggest that you are trying to reduce your beam size. So this is the amount of nutrients that are hitting your sample purely for the fact that you don't have enough sample. If you're reducing the beam size purely for that reason, it's kind of a waste of nutrients. Very mind, they're normally the most valuable thing that you're dealing with. But for example, you can't fill up a cell that has a one milliliter capacity if you only have 300 microliters. So it is something to consider if you have very, very limited samples, you may have to be quite creative with the cell holder that you have. And finally, what cells do the beam line actually use? You'll see in a minute, there are a multitude of different types of cells, and some beam lines only have cell holders, so ways to support, say for example, the Bantu cells, or for example, the narrow cubettes. You may have your own cubettes that you want to bring along to the beam line. That's great. And absolutely, every beam line is more than happy for you to use its own, but typically they also have their own cells that a user or a scientist can borrow and use for their experiments with obviously the caveat that they clean them and give them back and ideally not broken or scratched. But with that in mind, that's also something to consider because these also have slightly different volumes and slightly different considerations. So moving on from that, once you've had an idea, so these are the type of questions you have to ask. But you also, to ask these questions, you need to know about the different sample cells that are actually available to you. So we have our cells that we put our samples in. We don't want this cell to have its own scattering signal that will add confusion to your own data. We don't want them to have a high background, so kind of the high, the finer features. So what we typically use for small and commercial and scattering experiments are these court cells, most commonly a combo between these narrow cells, these Bantu cells, and these wide course cubettes. As I mentioned, the kind of the size of your cell depends on a couple of features about your sample itself. So our beam is going through this part of the cell. So through the window, we try to fill up this window. So if we have a sample aperture in front of it, we try to fill up the window as much as possible with the sample aperture. So we want to get equally here. So we have a Bantu cell. If you have a circular aperture, you can fill up quite a lot of the sample window with the beam. Obviously more beam, higher, faster measurements, better statistics, etc, etc. But then we also have a thickness in the depth. These you can all see here are one millimeter thick, have the little markings on them. And I would suggest, or kind of an offhand estimate, always using the one millimeter thick cells for samples with more than 50% hydrogen or that are quite concentrated. So you want to reduce the path length where the neutron's going to have to scan around and hit multiple samples and multiple particles. Then maybe you can go towards the two or five millimeter sample cells, a path length sample cells for predominantly geoduated samples. So for example, if your sample is in D2O, it's one way percent. I'd highly recommend using the two millimeter path length cells because then you have more sample volume. And I think you probably saw from Adrian's talk this morning, the more sample volume you have, the more scatter you get double the scattering. You should get double the scattering intensity, say lower transmission, and obviously faster measurements and again better statistics. Other things to consider. So these all have stoppers, if you have particularly volatile samples, or even just geodirated solvents, I would highly recommend using stopper samples that are power-filmed up so you don't get obviously evaporation of your sample. And obviously you want to, if you have a geodirated sample, you want to minimize the contact with air and H2O in the air to keep it as pure as possible D2O. But in some cases, you may want to go for these non-stopper type varieties. So they're essentially sliced off at the top. If you have quite a narrow film or a bit more of a gel type material, oftentimes these can be a bit easier to fill. I briefly touched upon the fact that there are a multitude of different shell shapes. As you can see here, these wider shells allows alloys to use even wider neutron beams. So if you have a very weak scattering sample, this may be an attractive option for you. Obviously the swings and roundabouts because of the playoff between collimation and stuff like that, but this may be a one approach to go. Obviously, one of the common paradoxes is that the weekly scattering samples quite oftentimes are very precious protein samples. So they're both weekly scattering, but also really hard to get large volumes of. So while they would suit better in a cell like this, oftentimes there's only enough material to really fit them into our cell. Another type of cell design is the sandwich cells. Most facilities have their own version of this, but they're all essentially the same setup. We have these two quartz windows that we then put together with a spacer in between. This spacer keeps the two windows directly touching and also defines the path length. They're then put inside a metallic or a metal, normally aluminum type structure, and then you can put that into a beam as well. Some facilities use these as standards for all measurements, but typically in a lot of facilities they only use them for materials that are extremely viscous and can't be loaded into these type of cells. For films, maybe it might be a meshy network of, I don't know, some kind of like cottony type of material, something that doesn't easily go into this type of setup, or gels, for example. As I mentioned, the volumes range typically between 200 microliters up to a milliliter or even a couple of milliliters depending on if you go up to five millimeter path length. And some sample environments, so this is quite towards a soft matter type of sample environments, but may go more towards, say for example a metal, aluminum type cell holder, whether it be inside a cryostat or something like that. But the important take home message is with all of these cells, they're highly reproducible, so they will have almost identical, they're very, very well machined or manufactured, so the path lengths and the thicknesses of the windows are reliably very similar. So for example, you can measure the background on one cell in order for your data reductions, and you can use that background for the rest of the cells used in that measurement. They have this low scattering, so they don't contribute to a Saturn signal, and a low background. Of course now we have our cells, we need somewhere to hold them. Excuse me. Every small angle neutron scattering instrument across the facilities will have some version of this cell holder. They can be wildly different in terms of the design, but they all have more or less the exact same function. This is at Saturn CD. We have our neutron beam coming along this pipe here, and we have our final sample aperture here just before the sample, and then our detector window, our detectors, is behind this window here. So our neutron beam is in a fixed position. We need to move our sample changer across the beam. In this particular design, there's a sample changer along this, so you can see all of these little holes. You put the cells in from the top, and then there's a second row on the bottom. So in order to change the sample position, there's a motorized translation table underneath that goes left, right, and up, down. And this is all obviously controlled by computer software from, with computers. So you say which cell you put in position A, B, C, D, and then it auto, as you change through the samples, it auto moves the table to the right position. These type of cell holders typically have temperature control by circulating water baths, so the water goes in at the bottom, and this scenario heats the block and that heats these cell positions. The temperature range with these type of designs ranges normally from about 10 to 100 degrees. We have different sample environments to go to slightly more extreme temperature conditions. So that's how we control them. They're reasonably quick, maybe 10 minutes, so five minutes for a 10 degree change, and then there's normally a limited amount of humidity control. So if you can see here on the bottom row, there's kind of a metal box that's around the equivalent of these cell holders on the bottom, and there's also a metal box that will go around the top here. This allows us to control, it's an easier way to kind of control the temperature of these cells, but also say for example we're going quite cold, the cells can get condensation on them. If say if we go down to 10 degrees, there could start to be condensation that's forming on the cell, on the surface, which can obviously contribute to our scattering signal, so we also have the ability to blow in dried air to remove the condensation, kind of a little bit more control of the environment. Again, these cell holders are very highly reproducible, they hold the neutron cell in position and come with controllable temperature. Please interrupt me if you have any questions. Here, so next example are these continuous flow cells. These are slightly more creative than the previous example, so in this scenario you only have one cell. This is something like this, your sample is flowed in from the bottom out for the top when the sample is in the sample position. The flow, so when the cell is filled up, using for example a HPLC pump or a syringe pump, it stops because it just stops and the valves are closed. The sample size and position, you make your measurement, which measurement is done. The material continues to flow through the cell, so as I said out through the top, then you can put in say for example water ethanol, wash through the old material, potentially blow free air and then load the next sample. One of the, all into the same cell. One of the beauties about these type of setups is the level of automation that you have. So a HPLC pump may have four or eight or more different sample containers that you can source from. And say for example, I'm sure Adrian mentioned about doing contrast variation studies where you might measure 100% etio, 90% etio, 80% etio, so on so forth mixing with H2O. Typically if we were to do an experiment in this type of cell holder, we would have to prepare each of those samples, fill it into a cell and then measure them, then you have to take the cells out, you have to clean them, dry them, wash them. Oftentimes being some users, this favorite part of an experiment is the cleaning of the cells. This allows a degree of automation and essentially the HPLC pump has the ability to obviously mix together the different solvent ratios or the different samples, pre-mix them together, mixes them in a container in the pump, and then flows them through to the cell. There are of course limitations to these type of things for HPLC, so typically used in kind of biology type biochemistry, they're not great abysses samples. So once it gets particularly viscous, this type of setup starts to struggle, that's where the syringe pumps come in, but there's still disadvantages there. Also, when you fill a cell, you measure and you put it out and you force it out and you do this cleaning routine, it's not always the case, you can get it 100%. So you run the risk of having contamination carrying for your experiment. Obviously you don't want any residual from the previous sample going into the second and ultimately concentration or worse altering the chemical makeup. So they're great, but they have to in general be used in caution, but they do allow automated filling and cleaning of the sample, and you have the benefit of the same sample cells for all the measurements. So whenever you have your background measurements, you're using the same cell. Also because it's the same cell, it's ideal for in situ and in line measurements, right? If we want to do something else towards the side or coming like perpendicular to the cell or in another region, we can do it all in the one cell and we don't have to, I think this will come clear later when I start talking about some of the more creative sample environment setups, but there's a huge benefit to doing everything towards the one cell. Moving on again, kind of a similar to the last setup with the automated samples. Here we have a stop flow cell. So this is very much commercially available. It's you can't really see here, but this is from biologics. This is a stop flow cell and it allows for rapid mixing of our samples directly before measurement. So here you can see the four syringes. These four syringes, you can set it up so it will select say 25% of each of them. It rapidly sucks them into a mixing chamber here, a small volume mixing chamber just below and then kind of, once I'm mixed, flow them straight up into the sample cell. This can happen, has two huge benefits. It can happen on a really, really, really short time scale and there's a really small amount of sample loss because this whole transition is very, very, the piping and stuff is very, very small. For these type of experiments, I can, I think the last I looked, they were down to a couple of milliseconds from triggering the mixing to getting the mixing into the cell to starting the measurement. So if you want to look at something that when you mix it, it changes structure almost instantly or really early on and track the kinetics and as the sample changes through time, this is the ideal type of setup to do that. So yeah, as I said, for undergoing systems that undergo fast kinetics or fast structural changes. Also, you can buy a particular neutron head or this top device even has controllable temperature. So it is quite elegant. Also, it has the ability to flush out a previous sample and automate in the next sample. One of the huge advantages to this setup, as I kind of briefly referred to versus this setup is you can kind of see even from this picture, the mountain of piping that you have going between the HPLC pump is typically quite a big chamber for the mixing, then you have to take from the HPLC pump to your cell. There is a very, very false, very small volume loss going from here to here. But has other limitations, the volumes and syringes and stuff like that quite small. Yeah, we can do much greater volumes and a greater variety of materials in this type of setup. So the next kind of topic I wanted to change pace a little bit was moving on to reality. I will actually talk a lot more about reality sands experiments tomorrow in the applications of sands, the biology, natural materials section because applications to tomorrow after Elizabeth, but very briefly tell you a little bit about the sample cells. So should I know rheology? As I expect everyone knows about rheology, rheosands experiments, by combining rheology and sands, rheosands experiments help us to understand the structural reorganization of fluids as a result of flow. Oftentimes, when we apply stress, strain, some kind of shear onto a sample, whether it be long chains, it will change structure and we're interested in that structure that performs whilst it's under flow. The most common setup to you to look at these type of materials is the telequette cell on, say, for example, an atom power rheometer or TA instruments rheometer. And the setup, kind of the typical cells are shown here. As you can see, it's kind of hard to point out, but we have a bob. So this is the internal rotating bit. We have a cup, which is the external rotating bit. So this is the start line and the sketch. This outer glass ring is actually just the, it's to control the temperature or kind of the humidity around the cell itself. But these are all made out of quartz in order to allow for easy transmission. It's slightly easier shown here though. So this is the cup I referred to, the gray bit and the blue is the bob. Your sample sits between the two and then the internal bob rotates, creating a shear on the material. Before I go into that, so with this in mind, there are kind of multiple planes of interest. So we have our neutron beam, which is typically a long slit. We can fire it at the centre of the cell. This is a one free plane. We can fire at the edge of our cell in our two free plane. Or if possible, we could fire the neutron beam from above down through the cell. Obviously that's not possible with this setup, but we do have more specialist designed cells, one, two shear cells that are referred to in order to put up at this plane. It's important to note, and again, I'll get into more tomorrow, is each plane offers specific information to describe the structure property relationships in these type of materials. So it's important to be able to measure all of these different axes. Having said all that, this is not an exclusive setup. There are a multitude of different setups in order to measure systems under flow, such as posing jet cells, sliding plates, capillary flow, small microfluidic setups, or these one two shear cells. I'm not, for the purposes of the length of this talk, I'm not going to go into any great detail on these. But if you are interested in rheology and potentially rheology scattering, I ploy to look into it, even contact me or contact, I guess, Andrew Jackson, and happily to put you in contact with people that we know here are definite experts in that area. Just to show you here, this is actually a setup that I had at one of the beam lines at NIST or NCNR in the US in Maryland. We have our neutral beam coming in here, our detector hand window on the left hand side. You can see this giant box around it. It's actually because our sample was photo switchable. So it, when we shined UV light on it, the molecules within our wormlet micelles change structure. And as a result, the molecules change structure. So the overall macro structure that we see with sands also changed. So in order, and the rheological property, so in order to deal with all three problems in situ, the instrument scientists kindly set up this pseudo black box for us to measure everything. Okay, changing track a little bit more again, we move on to our guinea meter stages. So shown here is an example of a Huber stack. These, before every sample area, we'll have some kind of translation stages to go up, down, left, right, maybe a little bit forward, a little bit back. And oftentimes, sample areas will also have the ability to either permanently install these guinea meters or to be able to put them in for the purpose of one individual experiment. These guinea stacks are essentially rotation stages. So they are able to rotate around a particular fixed point of interest, whether that be for back in front or forward back. These types of stages are crucially important, for example, if you want to perform grazing incidence measurements, whether that be for sacks or sands, or quite commonly within the more kind of hard matter sciences for experiments of magnets or cryostats. They allow the ability to finely control the angle of tilt and the speed at which you tilt. They also come in a range of sizes from the ability to rotate a 10 kilogram type setup to, I don't know, a 500 kilogram setup, depending on the type of sample, whether you want to just put your sample for G stands on there or whether you want to put an entire magnet on there and rotate that. With that in mind, we of course also have magnets. As mentioned, I'm very much a soft matter scientist, so I will leave it to Elizabeth Blackburn in the lecture you have this afternoon to go into this in far more detail. But here's just a couple of examples. This warm bore electromagnet, which goes up to 2.5 Tesla, for the purposes of kind of the lipid nanoparticle or the magnetic nanoparticle type stuff that errs towards the soft matter science, this is typically enough. But then on the other extreme, we have the giant Birmingham magnet, which goes up to 17 Tesla. This magnet famously towards the countries, going from Isis to ILL, to Isis in the UK, to ILL in France, and to other institutes. In order to be measured, this is of course a super high field magnet. I'm personally seeing Elizabeth working with this in the ILL, so I'm sure she can tell you more about it. And the take on message is we can also apply controllable magnetic fields to samples that are being measured. Okay, we also have the ability to perform pressure experiments. I don't really have much to say about this. This is a pressure cell that exists at NIST. We can probably pressure to the sample up to several kilobar. And these exist at most facilities in one way or another. We also have the ability to control the temperatures to the extremes. So for example, super cold. So this is commonly referred to as the orange cryostat because they're orange. This is a picture from one in the ILL, but multitude of these orange cryostats exist at all facilities and work across all instrumentation. It's definitely not a science exclusive piece of sample environment. We also have furnaces. So sorry, the cryostats let you go down to a few Kelvin. While the furnace is really hot, let you go up to a couple of hundreds of degrees Celsius. Unlike our thermosive cell holder, which probably maxed out at about 100 degrees, go to 300, 400 degrees, depending on your samples, typically maybe polymer melts or something like that. Okay, so a lot of those were over off the shelf or easy to reproduce. They're commonly held designs in the industry that can be reproduced quite easily. Now I want to tell you very quickly or slash in the last 15 minutes or so about some advanced sample environments that also exist in the community, a custom built variety. So first of all, this is quite a simple case. And this for sure exists all neutron scattering facilities and all is available for pretty much all sans instruments are the rotating cell holders. So this is a really commonly held or commonly used sample environment setup, but there hasn't been a design that everyone's clued in and gone. This is absolutely the perfect design. We're going to use this for everybody, just because of the kind of the various limitations and the different requirements of each person. As a result, there are a multitude of different designs and in all instead hoping there's a there's a perfect one yet. But this is for example, a design that exists at the ESS. Here we it's probably easier to see on the bottom up salad Adrian Renny design. You attach your cell to the front of the kind of the rotating ring, and then for your measurement, your cell continuously rotates. This the purpose of this is largely for unstable dispersions or crystalline samples. So imagine you have a sample that has quite large particles or whatever and you leave it over time if precipitates and drops to the bottom. So if you want to keep it in suspension rather than having to take it out and mix it, these are perfect options that essentially prevent sedimentation. You have oftentimes controllable speeds and in a few select cases, you also have the ability for controllable temperature. As I mentioned, some of the bigger research collaboration consortiums for making sample environments for sound instruments. One of the big ones that the ESS is involved with is the FlexiPro project. This was a German BMBF collaboration between multiple I think three or four different institutes in Germany. And the idea behind this was to have these setups that are on a table like this that can be set up offline, calibrated everything in place. And then just before a beam time experiment, the sample environment is wheeled into the sample position. A few things clicked into place and the experiment can start. Oftentimes the custom built sample environments are because of the nature of them, quite complicated to set up. So for example, if you had to dismantle this entire setup and build it itself onto another table, that could be a day's work. And a day's work is a day's beam time. So that's not attractive. So this was an elegant way to get around that challenge. From the FlexiPro specifically, the name of this particular collaboration, there were three different sample environments that were developed. The first one being the in situ dynamic light scattering. So for scant sands, as you've heard, I guess multiple times now, we can measure length scales from one to a couple of hundred nanometers. For DLS, we can go a little bit further. So we'd go from the couple hundred nanometers or less than a couple hundred nanometers to the micrometer scale. This is two advantages. One, we access some additional length scales that we can't access just with sands. We obviously, to get with sands, we'd have to go to V-sands or nu-sands. But also, it's a really good way to check the stability of your sample. So I've seen this used before, for example, protein samples that might be mono dispersed initially, but over the passage of time, the sample may look stable to the eye, but it actually has started to aggregate. Because with the speed of dynamic light scattering, you measure a measurement within, I don't know, a second, we can make far more frequent measurements simultaneously in the length of a typical sands experiment at a reactor, which could be anything from five to 20 minutes. It's a good way to then understand when your sample has started to go bad, wherever you can stop the measurement, et cetera, et cetera. This is the German collaboration. So this setup is available, I think, for use at JCNS in Munich. But also, it's important to note that there are quite a lot of facilities have their own versions of in-situ dynamic light setup setups that are available. So if it's something you're interested in, it's worth checking out. The second setup that was used, that was developed in this collaboration, was a humidity chamber for GCNS. So shown by the kind of slightly low-res computer graphic here, we can see these different, these are our goniometer studies. So they allow for samples for GCNS to be able to tilt and kind of finally tilt your sample to get the right orientation. And then on top of it, you can see where you actually put your sample inside on a humidity chamber. So inside these, we can control the humidity of your sample to a really high humidity and temperature sample to a really high degree. One of the nice things about this setup is oftentimes GCNS experiments can be quite laborious to perform. So even though they're quite long measurements, you have to spend quite a long time, every time you measure a sample, realigning your sample on your sample stage. What they did to kind of partly overcome this exercise was to do multiple stages. So although each of these stages has to be aligned quite precisely, you can align, I think in the real example they had five goniometer stacks, you can align all five, set up the measurement and set it going on a really, really long measurement. So that's what I meant by the interchangeable samples. The final example I couldn't find a picture for was the foam cell. This cell allows you to generate bubbles. So oftentimes people are interested in looking at the surface structure of bubbles with different surfactants or even in kind of like beer foams. I can't think of anything else that forms a foam. But then you generate the foam, the very, very short lives, you can't measure, make them in a lab and then take them onto a beam line because often by that time, obviously your bubbles are lost. So this cell allowed them to measure, to generate them in situ and then measure them just as they're formed and it keeps regenerating the bubbles for a long enough time for you to get the right statistics on your data to get something useful. I should say that if anyone is interested in any of these, I stupidly didn't put a reference specifically, but you can have a google first to prove and it will come up or get in contact with me and I'll put you in contact with the relevant scientists. Okay, so I think this is the second to last example I wanted to tell you about and this one is one slightly more close to my heart because it's a collaboration that I'm more directly involved with. So this is the Nerf sample environment. This is a Swedish research council collaboration funded consortium between Cedric Dico in Lund University, Adrienne Rene in Uppsala and Andrew Jackson in ESS and myself. So this is all building on a SIRF setup, so the equivalent but for x-rays where we could combine x-ray small angles scattering with UV-biz fluorescence and Raman spectroscopies, thus giving us our SIRF while this was kind of part of Cedric's work and then a couple of years ago they decided to build the equivalent for the neutrons. This setup, as you can kind of see the current generation is more better represented here, we have our neutrons going through the continuous flow cell that I talked about earlier which is powered by the HVLC pumps, neutrons going through we measure our sands, we have our samples coming in from the bottom out through the top, we can measure UV-biz perpendicular to the sample on the same cell, we can measure fluorescence kind of at slightly odour angles to the cell as you can see from these fluorescent plugs here and also if we by connecting an inline densiometer, so further down the kind of the tube chain, we can also measure the density of our samples, not quite so simultaneously in that case but on the same sample. So just to show it in real life you can see all of the different fiber optics for the spectrometers, you can see the cables coming out through the top and kind of the shown here by the green line that's your sample going in. This particular setup was powered by Knauer HPLC pumps for sample mixing, the flow cell, sorry the fluorescence devices, the fluorescence and UV-biz devices were all connected by fiber optics, the ocean optics, portable spectrometers and then an antipolar densiometer. We performed these test measurements at both ILL and ISIS and very recently ISIS actually copied replicated the entire setup, they've done actually a lot of the development work on this too and now it's actually available already for sample environment at the ISIS Larmor instrument. So you can see here one of the really sweet things about the sample is the way that Cetric in particular has cleverly designed it, all of the probes go through the same area of the sample. Now of course our neutron beam is the biggest area of probe but our UV-biz and our fluorescence all go through the same area so you're really measuring the in-situ simultaneous information. This is ideal for samples that have these type of characteristics that change so obviously we can measure all these offline and that's the typical reason why don't you just do this offline but in some occasions you will have samples that may for example aggregate in there for the UV-biz changes or they have special fluorescence effects that will change over time so it's particularly important if you are looking to do more time-resolved measurements or you want to correctly characterize the concentration of your sample if it's come through and you have UV-biz information about the concentration of the samples. It also then has this added automation because it's powered by the HPLC pump it's essentially all built on top of a flow cell as described earlier we can set up loads of samples to measure or we can program in to measure loads of samples the HPLC pump will prepare them flow them through will then measure our sands fluorescence UV-biz if we have our in-diameter set up we can also measure that. Get all of the data out so it's awesome because you get tons of data out at the end but it's also terrible because you get tons of data at the end that you have to try and manage and understand so a lot of work is actually going in trying to manage that these large data packets and trying to understand what information you can get out of them. One of the last setups I'll tell you about was the calorimetry so as you can see this is a terrible figure but this is heat flow on the top and time along the bottom and say for example if your sample changes if you expect some phase transitions over your sample with temperature you can use this in-situ differential scanning calorimetry setup I don't know of many other places that have this in-line setup in-situ setup other than quark at Anster so you might have to go that's in Australia so you might have to go quite a long way to use that. So very finally what's the take-home message well I just wanted to say that I'm kind of reiterate again that sample environments exist for almost every request from every sample environment setup that you can think of there's probably a sample environment available for you if you want to do some kind of in-situ manipulation it's always worth asking around one of the big limitations might be that the sample environment you want exists in Australia which is of course not always practical but if that's not the case we can always consider making it so whether that be a collaboration where you get a Swedish research council grant for example or another research council grant or you work with the instrument team if it's something that that facility might also find interesting to use the fact that it doesn't exist isn't necessarily a precluder to it not ever existing in the future of course if it's not physically practical then you got to run with that but so I am 10 minutes earlier than I actually plan to be but I think everyone's got lunch time next does anyone have any questions please show I've lost my screen altogether so I can't see anybody thanks I have a question yeah okay you mentioned this the scattering even from sample itself then that it's not easy to shoot is there any way you do like some calibration machine before anything or how do you minimize yeah so from our sample cells we don't really get scattering from our sample cells or quartz qubits that's a risk that's why we use quartz in order to avoid getting the scattering from the sample cells what we do get is reduced transmission so our sample cell I think is like 98 percent transmission or something like that whether than 100 with no beam there with no cell there in place at all so we do measure as a correction we will reduce kind of the the scattering or the transmission contribution from the empty cell as well exactly as a part of that we also might do that for the solvent so you'll measure the solvent in the empty cell and subtract that from your overall scattering of your sample okay we are really interested to measure hydrogen in the metal but this metal sample should be in a like a accurate environment I think no no no no sorry no no no not all um you can just measure some solid samples so they can be just taped in place in the beam and just measured like that if you want to just measure them directly in the beam and a normal cell holder will have a way that you can just put them into position they absolutely do not need to be in the solvent just that this is more self-matter focused but for example they can also be put into a little tiny holder isn't put into if you want to put them into a cryostat depending on I don't know if your materials have any extreme conditions that you want to measure them in but absolutely you can just be put in the beam they just get taped normally so we are thinking about the in-situ measurement try to push hydrogen into the metal and why we are doing measurement but do you think that's possible I think so if so for example the humidity chamber type things I don't know how you push the hydrogen into the sample so if you have a hydrogen filled atmosphere which is obviously I think your bigger concern is trying to get someone to let you have a tank of hydrogen um I don't know how you go about doing it but if it's with a gas you could fill up a chamber with the gas and continuously pressurize it and then get it in but again I don't know how you what do you take the hydrogen from yeah well from the actually from water I mean it's really electrochemical charging oh yeah sorry I did not see give an example of an electrical chemical cell but yeah electrical chemical cells exist for sands completely so if you is one of your electrodes the metal sample yeah so one of your electrodes is a metal sample then you have another electrode and you have it all suspended in water yeah exactly that's the idea I mean we're trying to to make this 100% think you can do that there are electrochemical cells that for sure exist but I think that would probably be a bit more bespoke but whatever you need like a potential starter or an AC yeah it's power supply oh you know a lab where you use a power supply and we have done this at synchrotones so it's no problem for the x-ray but now because of the background issue we're thinking try how to solve that yeah absolutely something you can do um you may want to use depending on how you want to set up the electrodes you may need to use like a titanium cell holder or something like that if you want that to be one of the electrodes or you can put it all in quartz that's fine as well um just I think it just takes a little bit creative thinking about how you do but I don't think if you want to email me about more than happy to talk and we can sketch it out