Hannover 2010 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Downloads | Help

SYDI: Symposium Diffractive Imaging

SYDI 1: Imaging of biological systems

SYDI 1.1: Invited Talk

Friday, March 12, 2010, 10:30–11:00, E 415

Flash diffraction imaging with X-ray lasers — •Janos Hajdu — Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics, Uppsala University, Husargatan 3 (Box 596), SE-751 24 Uppsala, Sweden

Short, intense and coherent pulses from X-ray lasers provide exciting new capabilities in understanding the structure of biological cells, complex materials, and matter under extreme conditions. In previous work at FLASH (Hamburg), we have demonstrated that the imaging process can be faster than the damage process, which is a significant step towards our long-term goal of single-particle imaging at atomic resolutions. Biomolecular imaging has become one of the most exciting potential applications of X-ray lasers like the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at Stanford. However, the rate at which a large biomolecule explodes in the LCLS pulse while it is being imaged is one of the largest unknowns in this kind of experiment and will likely be one of the major factors in determining if such imaging will succeed. The dynamics of this explosion are complex, depending on an interplay of various aspects of energy deposition, evolution of ionization, and electron heating in the system. Therefore, it is a high priority to understand these dynamics. Experiments at the LCLS-AMO end station explore the underlying physics of how the LCLS pulse deposits energy in large clusters of atoms/molecules and the nature of the subsequent explosion. In parallel, new imaging experiments were also performed at LCLS and show interpretable diffraction data from single virus particles. The talk will survey recent experimental results.