Design of low profile sample stage

Abstract

The Italian Neutron Experimental Station, or INES for short, instrument beamline at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Spallation Source recently underwent an upgrade to its sample positioning area to improve the sample handling capability and capacity of the instrument. INES is a powder diffractometer instrument devoted to materials characterization and cultural heritage studies. Due to the types of samples received for cultural heritage studies the instrument scientists wanted to maximize the height of samples that could be scanned with the instrument. This paper covers the in-house design and delivery of a new, two axis, linear positioning stage for INES that due to the addition of a new linear height stage, needed to be as low profile as possible to give the instrument scientists the sample capacity they required.