Introduction to BMM

1. Introduction to BMM#

BMM is NIST’s Beamline for Materials Measurement.

At the unix command line, do this to start the Bluesky user interface, bsui:

cd ~/.ipython/profile_goniometer
pixi run start

bsui is simply an IPython shell with some customizations specific to Bluesky. On top of that, there are a number of customizations specific to BMM.

In this user manual, there are chapters covering most of the chores one will need to do at the beamline, including:

  1. moving motors

  2. making motor scans

  3. making reflectivity and pole figure scans

  4. troubleshooting common problems

1.1. TL;DR#

Open/close the shutter

shb.open() and shb.close(), see Shutters, Section 2.5.1

Sample alignment scans

Use the RE(linescan()) command, see {name}, Section {number}

Cheatsheet

Command cheatsheet, Section 6

1.3. BMM and Building 743#

BMM is on the south side of the NSLS-II building: what3words: ///width.corrugated.support

You should park at building 743 and enter through the main entrance of 743.

_images/map.png

Fig. 1.2 Route from the Main Gate to Building 743#

Walk though the lobby to the doors that lead out onto the experimental floor. BMM is just across the walk way from the doors to the 743 lobby.

_images/743lobby.jpg
_images/corridor.jpg
_images/BMMcontrolstation.jpg

Fig. 1.3 (Left) Approaching the floor through the lobby of Building 743. (Center) BMM is just across the corridor from the door to the 743 lobby. (Right) Walk past the diagonal support beam and head into the BMM control station#

BMM’s staff have offices on the outer hallway of Building 743.

_images/LOB-3.png

Fig. 1.4 Bruce’s, Jean’s and Vesna’s offices in Building 743#

1.4. Acknowledgements#

Pride of place goes to the late Jimmy Biancarosa and to Don Abel, the excellent technicians who helped build BMM and outfit it with kit that works. Truly nothing would have ever happened at BMM without them.

BMM’s Bluesky profile was mostly written by Bruce. But this would not have happened without the help of several members of NSLS-II’s DSSI program. In particular, I want to thank Dan Allan, Tom Caswell, Josh Lynch, Jakub Wlodek, Max Rakitin, Dmitri Gavrilov, Stuart Campbell, Abby Giles, Garrett Bishof, Nate Maytan, Matt Snyder, Oksana Ivashkevych, Ryan Jaskiel, AJ Sliger, John Sinsheimer, and Jun Ma.

Thanks to every BMM user – being a BMM user means being a beta tester for the beamline software!

Aside from the Bluesky ecosystem, BMM makes use of lots of great python tools. Matt Newville’s Larch is used to process every XAS scan that gets measured and Matt’s lmfit is used for many alignment chores.

This documentation project uses Sphinx and the lovely {book}theme from the The Executable Book Project. Appendices are numbered properly using the appendix.py extension from heig-tin-info/handout.

This manual uses a GitHub action to build and deploy (see details here) this document whenever a git push happens. We are grateful to the UIBCDF developers for this continuous deployment capability.

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