Crystal Annealing

Cryogenic data collection is a tight-rope walk between lowering radiation damage and increasing mosaicity due to lattice disordering produced during cooling of the crystal. Cryo-annealing can significantly reduce the mosaicity of the crystals and can also improve diffraction of flash-cooled crystals that were mistreated during transfer to and from cryogenic storage (for additional information read: Harp et al., 1999)

The setup of the HZB-MX beamlines allows easy application of this method by providing a cryo-annealing shutter. With this shutter it is possible to block the cryostream for a predefined time and therefore recover diffraction (see Figure 1).