AXES, Advanced X-ray Emission Spectrometer, is an instrument for the measurements of soft x-ray emission spectra, in the 460-1500 eV energy range. Designed and built a the Dipartimento di Fisica of the Politecnico di Milano, it is permanently installed at the beamline ID08 of the ESRF ( European Synchrotron Radiation Facility). It is property of the CNR/INFM. It is based on a grazing incidence diffraction grating (spherical shape, variable line density) and on an x-ray CCD detector. It can reach a resolving power greater than 2000, at the highest level worldwide. In consideration of the beam line providing the x-rays used to excite the sample, SAXES will be used to study the electronic excitations of crystalline samples based on 3d transition metals and on lanthanides. In the first 10 years of activity, AXES has given more than 40 publications on international journals.
AXES, thanks to an official agreement between the CNR/INFM and the ESRF, is accessible to any users through the standard beam time allocation procedure on public ESRF beamlines.