The “Historical Materials BAG”: A New Facilitated Access to Synchrotron X-ray Diffraction Analyses for Cultural Heritage Materials at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility

Abstract

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) has recently commissioned the new Extremely Brilliant Source (EBS). The gain in brightness as well as the continuous development of beamline instruments boosts the beamline performances, in particular in terms of accelerated data acquisition. This has motivated the development of new access modes as an alternative to standard proposals for access to beamtime, in particular via the “block allocation group” (BAG) mode. Here, we present the recently implemented “historical materials BAG”: a community proposal giving to 10 European institutes the opportunity for guaranteed beamtime at two X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) beamlines—ID13, for 2D high lateral resolution XRPD mapping, and ID22 for high angular resolution XRPD bulk analyses—with a particular focus on applications to cultural heritage. The capabilities offered by these instruments, the specific hardware and software developments to facilitate and speed-up data acquisition and data processing are detailed, and the first results from this new access are illustrated with recent applications to pigments, paintings, ceramics and wood.

Synchrotron X-ray diffraction computed tomography to non-destructively study inorganic treatments for stone conservation

“…Furthermore, the X-raying of CH materials with highly brilliant SR beams can induce X-ray damages to soft/metastable/organic materials and can compromise the possibility to perform further investigations on the same sample (i.e. ( Cotte et al., 2022 )). Therefore, side effects and composition changes induced by X-rays should be critically evaluated prior to XRDCT measurements.…”

“…At present, absorption or phase contrast μ-CT is usually applied to extract the 3D spatial information of different phases of interest within a sample, but suffers from the difficulty in the unambiguous identification of the sample mineralogy. Moreover, X-ray diffraction and vibrational spectroscopies (i.e., Raman and FTIR) allow the identification of the mineralogical nature of crystalline phases and also provide a spatially resolved dataset (either by mapping or imaging) ( Bertasa et al., 2017 ; Cotte et al., 2022 ; Liu and Kazarian, 2022 ; Possenti et al., 2018a ) but only on 2D matrices and, in many cases, invasive sample preparation is required (grinding, embedding in polished cross section, and preparation of thin sections).…”

Imaging and micro-invasive analyses of black stains on the passepartout of Codex Atlanticus Folio 843 by Leonardo da Vinci

“…Two types of X-ray diffraction (XRD) measurements were performed, both in the framework of the “Historical Materials BAG” 15 . High angular resolution XRD (HR-XRD) measurements were collected at ID22 beamline on samples from the dark and white regions, employing a radiation energy of 35 keV.…”

A study of Cadmium Yellow paints from Joan Miró’s paintings and studio materials preserved at the Fundació Miró Mallorca

“…Synchrotron Radiation (SR) µXRD mapping on micro cross-sections (samples A4, A7, A9 and A12) was performed at the ID13 beamline of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF, Grenoble), bene tting from the Historical Materials BAG [21]. The µXRD branch was used to perform crystalline phase mapping using a 2.5 × 2.5 µm 2 beam with an energy of 13 keV.…”