Berlin 2014 – scientific programme
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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik
MO 13: Posters 3: Cold Molecules, Helium Nano Droplets, and Experimental Techniques
MO 13.30: Poster
Wednesday, March 19, 2014, 16:30–18:30, Spree-Palais
An optical pipeline for femtosecond diffractive imaging — Rick Kirian1, •Salah Awel1, 2, 3, Niko Eckerskorn4, Andrei Rode4, Jochen Küpper1, 2, 3, and Henry Chapman1, 2, 3 — 1Center for Free-Electron Laser Science, DESY, Hamburg — 2Center for Ultrafast Imaging, University of Hamburg — 3Department of Physics — 4Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
The availability of brief, intense, and coherent x-ray pulses produced by x-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) has created the potential for major advancements in macromolecular structure determination. Serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) is among the most succesful emerging new paradigms. It consists of directing a stream of randomly oriented protein microcrystals or molecules across the focus of the XFEL beam. However, delivering single molecules to a sub-micron x-ray focus remains a considerable challenge. Current sample delivery efficiencies for single-molecule imaging based on aerodynamic lens systems are on the order of 10−7 on average, which renders experiments infeasible for samples that cannot be obtained in high abundance. In order to confront this challenge, we are developing techniques for manipulating aerosolized nanoparticles with specially shaped laser illumination. Our experiments are presently aimed at transversely confining streams of particles as they exit an aerosol injector, which produces a 50 µm diameter stream, with a counter-propagating “hollow” quasi-Bessel beam. The experiment exploits radiation pressure and/or thermal forces arising from the interaction of the particles with surrounding gas [1].
[1] Opt. Exp. 21, 30492-30499 (2013)