Rapid sample delivery for megahertz serial crystallography at X-ray FELs

Abstract

Sample delivery is a major challenge to performing serial crystallography experiments at upcoming high-repetition-rate X-ray free-electron lasers. The feasibility of using gas-driven liquid jets for this purpose at the FLASH facility in Hamburg has been studied.

Correlated emission of X-ray and sound from water film irradiated by femtosecond laser pulses

“…3(d). As for dynamic morphological changes on solution surfaces induced by laser irradiations, there have been a lot of reports such as nanosecond near-IR laser irradiation on water flow [33], 100-fs soft X-ray irradiation on water, ethanol, or protein suspension [34], and 300-fs UV laser irradiation on liquid toluene [35,36]. On the basis of the knowledge on time-resolved surface scattering images [35], at the delay time of 4.6 ns, the initial ablation process such as surface roughness or droplet formation has already started on the solution surface.…”

High-throughput in situ experimental phasing

“…However, very high quality diffraction data from significantly smaller crystals, including submicrometresized samples, are often achievable using SFX methods (Gati et al, 2017;Nass, Redecke et al, 2020). Consequently, various sample-presentation strategies have been developed to minimize background noise for SFX, because nanometre-sized to micrometre-sized crystals produce weaker diffraction data compared with traditionally sized samples (Awel et al, 2018;Beyerlein et al, 2017;Calvey et al, 2019;Dasgupta et al, 2019;Davy et al, 2019;Doak et al, 2018;Echelmeier et al, 2019;Fuller et al, 2017;Grunbein & Nass Kovacs, 2019;Lieske et al, 2019;Martiel et al, 2019;Meents et al, 2017;Mehrabi et al, 2019;Monteiro et al, 2019;Nass, Gorel et al, 2020;Nogly et al, 2016;Oberthuer et al, 2017;Orville, 2017;Owen et al, 2017;Roedig et al, 2017;Schulz et al, 2018Schulz et al, , 2019Shelby et al, 2020;Sierra et al, 2016;Stagno et al, 2017;Suga et al, 2020;Sugahara et al, 2017;Weinert et al, 2017;Wiedorn et al, 2018;Zhao et al, 2019). In addition, X-ray pulse durations of tens of femtoseconds and the tight focus and intensity of XFEL pulses often produce very high-quality data sets with little or no radiation-induced effects in the data and refined atomic models.…”

Ultracompact 3D microfluidics for time-resolved structural biology

“…New megahertz X-ray sources require jets that are fast enough to replenish undamaged sample in time for the next X-ray pulse 21 . For instance, it was estimated that jet speeds exceeding 100 m s −1 are needed to match the 4.5 MHz X-ray pulse trains of the European X-ray free-electron lasers (XFEL) [21][22][23][24] . However, typical GDVNs reach jet speeds of 10-30 m s −1 (refs.…”

“…[11][12][13] ) and after careful optimization up to 50-80 m s −1 (refs. [21][22][23][24] ). The accurate micro 3D printing that we present here, allowed us to recently demonstrate megahertz SFX using jet speeds exceeding 100 m s −1 (ref.…”