2019/10/28 by Amit Samanta, Muhamed Amin, Samanta, Amit K. +11 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Electron Microscopy Techniques and Applications #Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy Techniques #Advanced X-ray Imaging Techniques #Atomic and Molecular Clusters (physics.atm-clus) #Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #Chemical Physics (physics.chem-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1910.12606
openalex publication_date 2019/10/28 · openalex created_date 2022/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) promise the diffractive imaging of single\nmolecules and nanoparticles with atomic spatial resolution. This relies on the\naveraging of millions of diffraction patterns of identical particles, which\nshould ideally be isolated in the gas phase and preserved in their native\nstructure. Here, we demonstrated that polystyrene nanospheres and Cydia\npomonella granulovirus can be transferred into the gas phase, isolated, and\nvery quickly shockfrozen, i.e. cooled to 4~K within microseconds in a\nhelium-buffer-gas cell, much faster than state-of-the-art approaches.\nNanoparticle beams emerging from the cell were characterized using\nparticle-localization microscopy with light-sheet illumination, which allowed\nfor the full reconstruction of the particle beams, focused to\n<100 :\μ\m, as well as for the determination of particle flux and\nnumber density. The experimental results were quantitatively reproduced and\nrationalized through particle-trajectory simulations. We propose an optimized\nsetup with cooling rates for few-nanometers particles on nanoseconds\ntimescales. The produced beams of shockfrozen isolated nanoparticles provide a\nbreakthrough in sample delivery, e.g. for diffractive imaging and microscopy or\nlow-temperature nanoscience.\n