Automatic Alignment of X-Ray Beams

Protein crystals and other biological samples diffract weakly in X-rays. It is therefore important that the X-ray beam be very stable. Cubic smoothing splines were fit to ion chamber counts versus the vertical position of the sample. The extrema, inflection points about the maximum, and other information about the spline were calculated to determine whether the data corresponded to a beam profile. The algorithm developed here correctly identified the absence of a beam profile in all data gathered over the course of a year from four beam lines at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. This algorithm is effective and can be adapted to other beam lines