Freiburg 2024 – scientific programme
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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik
MO 25: Novel Experimental Approaches
MO 25.1: Talk
Friday, March 15, 2024, 11:00–11:15, HS 3044
Cryo-cooled beams of "small" macromolecules — •Jingxuan He1,2,3, Lena Worbs1,2, Surya Kiran Peravali1,4, Armando D. Estillore1, Amit K. Samanta1,3, and Jochen Küpper1,2,3 — 1Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL), Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Hamburg, Germany — 2Department of Physics, Universität Hamburg, Germany — 3Center for Ultrafast Imaging (CUI), Universität Hamburg, Germany — 4Fakultät für Maschinenbau, Helmut-Schmidt-Universität,Germany
We have demonstrated the preparation of cold and controlled beams of nanoparticles and macromolecules that are desired for x-ray single particle diffractive imaging (SPI) using the buffer-gas cell (BGC) cooling and aerodynamic focusing techniques [1-2]. The cooling and control techniques we developed for SPI can be extended to experiments to study the electron dynamics in complex biomolecules on the few femtosecond timescale, such as charge and energy transfer following electronic excitation, where the details have not been revealed so far [3]. We present an approach towards investigating the time-resolved ultrafast dynamics in proteins with UV/VIS ultrashort-pulse lasers. The photoexcitation-induced energy transfer, for instance, can be studied by photofragmentation of cryogenically-cooled proteins with time-of-light mass spectrometry and velocity-map-imaging.
[1] A. K. Samanta, et al., Structural dynamics 7, 024304 (2020)
[2] L. Worbs, et al., In preparation, (2024)
[3] H. Duan, et al., PNAS 114, 8493 (2017)
Keywords: Single particle imaging; Buffer gas cell; aerodynamic lens; ultrafast dynamics; mass spectrometry