Beamline 7.0 consists of a line of components through which an electron beam is passed. At the end of this line, the electron beam is (re)focused onto a small spot and scanned by X-ray microscopes. (See layout diagram XBL927-5322.)
The components of the beamline are pieces of equipment that manipulate the electron beam. Some of them have settings that can be specified by the experimenter (e.g., the entrance and exit slits of the monochromator). The beamline also includes components that provide information about the beam (e.g., the photon beam position monitors supply information about the position of the beam and also produce error signals). The final scans can result in data files (on the underlying file system).
The scientists who will be using the Electronic Notebook are from the University of Wisconsin. They use the beamline to study the electronic structures of materials, e.g. local chemical properties, degrees and types of order, spin (magnetic) properties, etc.
Currently, access to Beamline 7.0 seems to be controlled by a single 486 PC running LabVIEW. The PC controls the hardware and runs a LabVIEW server. Everyone (including researchers at ALS) runs LabVIEW as a client of this server. The experiments are conducted using a paper notebook system. Although LabVIEW does include some networking capabilities, remote users currently must have a collaborator physically at LBL who writes in the paper notebook and types things into the LabVIEW windows.
LabVIEW users can build their own "virtual instrumentation" systems, mixing and matching data acquisition and instrument control hardware. LabVIEW operates on a fairly wide range of platforms, and supports connection to other data sources via networking, interapplication communication, and SQL database links to a wide variety of databases, including ORACLE and Sybase. LabVIEW also include a suite of data analysis routines.