Advances in the detection at the new XMCD and RIXS beamline of the ESRF

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility is a synchrotron radiation source offering forefront experimental instrumentation for the investigation of the magnetic properties and the electronic structure of materials. Within a general upgrade programme of the facility, the new ID32 soft X-ray beamline has been built, offering two experimental end-stations: one for RIXS and the other for XMCD measurements. ERIXS, the new spectrometer of the RIXS branch, is designed to achieve an unprecedented resolving power, requiring the optimization of all its components. In the present work we explore the possibility of enhancing the spatial resolution of the CCD detector of the spectrometer, which can be done by calculating the centre of mass of the charge clouds generated by each photon. This approach introduces some artefacts in the reconstructed images that we were able to remove by using the so-called eta-algorithm and one of its possible extensions. In the meantime we carried out the very first experiment of the XMCD branch of ID32, studying the temperature dependence of weak ferromagnetism in samples of doped high-Tc superconducting cuprates.