During your experiment at PD
Contacts
Within office hours (9 am - 5 pm) - Beamline staff.
Outside of office hours - Control Room 24/7. +61 3 8540 4123
Beamtime start time
Experiments at the Powder Diffraction beamline start and end at 8:00 am. Beamline staff will be onsite from 8:00 am to do the primary setup of the beamline optics, wavelength calibration and set up sample environment. This doesn’t mean you need to be there at 8 am as the early stages of beamline setup do not require the presence of users. Your Beamline Scientist will contact you before and discuss what time you should come to the beamline.
Beamline induction
Users need to participate in the beamline-specific safety induction prior to beginning work on the beamline. Those new to the PD beamline or who have expired inductions must do one. Beamline inductions remain valid for 12 months. This is to ensure that beamline staff is available onsite to perform the induction and to ensure that all those involved in an experiment are trained to work safely.
Note: All experiment participants need to be available for the beamline induction at the beginning of the experiment as a single group, regardless of when they plan to work onsite, i.e. night shift users must be available at the start. Beamline staff cannot do inductions after hours or on weekends.
Please discuss with your Beamline Scientist if you need to arrive early or think you need access to other laboratories onsite.
User support
PD staff will leave the beamline once they have done their setup, safety induction work and training. You will then need to complete any specific experiment setup work and data collection yourself.
Weekdays: Beamline staff can be directly contacted 9-5 pm.
Weekends: Control Room.
After Hours (i.e. 17:00-08:00): Control Room.
Note: As of 2026 beamline staff are not on-call and cannot support your experiment after hours. The Control room is available 24/7.
Visitors
Users are not authorised to accompany visitors on-site at the synchrotron. Personnel who are not on the Experimental Authorisation form will not be allowed into the main synchrotron building.