Take a state-of-the-art micro-beam sealed tube generator with a specially designed high-performance optics, add a mardtb "desktop beamline" and a EIGER2 or a PILATUS3 or a mar345=  X-ray detector to it plus a cryo-cooler, put it into a shiny cabinet and you are getting a truly powerful yet very affordable complete X-ray data collection system - just perfect for single crystal crystallography, powder diffraction, SAXS, WAXS, diffuse scattering and other fields. No water and electrical installations required - it will fit anywhere in your lab.

But there's one more thing: forget about those maintenance budgets you are used to see elsewhere!

The marYX micro-beam generator together with an AXO multi-layer optic is a true alternative to modern rotating anode generators (RAGs). With the new marYX source the performance gap to small-focus RAGs like the Rigaku 007 becomes really small. The key question is:

Does a micro-beam sealed-tube generator allow to evaluate the diffraction power of small crystals?

The answer clearly is: yes, it does. This is because the generator delivers a very small beam with such a high brilliance that even very small crystals sized < 50 µm will see enough X-ray photons. This is achieved by a highly optimized combination of source and optics parameters. Please read the application notes for further details!

In experiments that we have carried out very carefully, we could show that the marμX system produces data comparable to traditional high-power rotating anode systems. In a test using lysozyme crystals it was possible to collect data of good enough quality for sulfur-SAD-phasing using only 90 degrees of data. The experiments are described in detailed in the application note mar.AN260107 from Jan 26, 2007.

In a second application note mar.AN070207 from Feb 07, 2007, a direct comparison between the marμX system and a rotating anode generator using the same experimental conditions (same crystals, exposure times, detector, etc.) revealed that small crystals produce superior data with the marμX system while the results for larger crystals are virtually identical.

In a third application note mar.AN20Jun08 from Jun 20, 2008, we compared the performance of the Xenocs FOX2D 10_30P optics and the latest model of the FOX3D 14_39P optics, which features an optimized high precision ellipsoidal substrate and a state-of-the-art multilayer to achieve a beam with improved focusing properties and high flux density. With the FOX3D optics we observed more than a 2-fold increase in observed diffraction as compared to the FOX2D optics, in particular when looking at small crystals. This brandnew optics narrows the gap to modern rotating anode generators, again.

In a fourth application note mar.AN28Oct10 from Oct 28, 2010, we compared the performance of the Xenocs GeniX3D Cu HF source running at 30 W with the previous Genix Cu VHF source running at 50 W. The new source entirely replaces the VHF model. It features a new tube and newly designed optics. In the application note we describe data collections from small molecule crystals of various forms and sizes. The new source proves to deliver more usable X-ray photons at the sample in the order of magnitude of 1.5. This makes the choice of a small scale generator setup even more attractive.