Requirements for x-ray magnetic circular dichroism on paramagnetic biological systems and model compounds

Abstract
We have built an end station for x-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) measurements on proteins and paramagnetic compounds. Our current setup reaches a base temperature of 2.6 K and magnetic fields up to 6 T and is operated at beamline 4.02 of the Advanced Light Source. In this article we discuss magnetic field and low temperature requirements needed to perform XMCD experiments on magnetically saturated samples. For a typical 3d transition metal paramagnetic system we find that fields above 4 T at a temperature of 2.6 K saturate the magnetization of the sample to more than 80%. We discuss principal considerations for a setup operated at low temperatures on a synchrotron and show that infrared heat shielding is unavoidable to obtain the base temperature at the sample. We show first experimental results from the vanadium (IV) compound VOSO4X[H2O].

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