This presentation concerns challenges in relation with planetary security (Dart Mission), spacecraft protection against debris, lightening (NDT/SHM) and life extension of structures (LSP).
In the first two cases, shocks induced by laser plasma reproduce pressure loadings involved in High Velocity Impact (HVI)(7-30 Km/s):
-to model physics,
-to select material,
-to design stacks of...
Additive Manufacturing (AM), both Laser Powder bed Fusion (LPBF) and Laser Blown Powder Directed Energy Deposition (LBP-DED) promise to produce unique, high quality components for aerospace to biomedical applications with unprecedented geometric complexity. However, the underlying physics controlling the melting, solidification, flow and other phenomena are still poorly understood. Many groups...
In the recent years we have established high energy surface sensitive X-ray diffraction as novel tool for the investigation of surfaces and nanostructures. It allows a significant acceleration of the measurements, making fast kinetic processes in in-situ and operando experiments accessible, which could not be addressed before [1-5]. These experiments allow to address fundamental processes in...
First Light Fusion (FLF) is a private UK company investigating a novel approach to inertial fusion energy (IFE), through means of hyper-velocity projectile-driven impact. Using a combination of a proprietary shock pressure amplification technology and a metallic-cased fuel-containing target, we are pursuing the goal of achieving fuel gain [1] in a quasi-spherical, volume ignition configuration...
Crystalline materials are ubiquitous. The performance of metals, ceramics and semiconductors is critical for addressing societal challenges; geoscience relates to rocks, ice and sediments while biomineralisation is an integral part of biology and Health technology. The physical and mechanical properties of such materials is often governed by their structure, which tend to be organized on many...
Silicate and Fe compound melts are major constituents of the interior of the Earth and rocky planets and have a strong impact on their evolution and properties. Despite this importance, information on properties of such melts at in-situ conditions are still scarce. Main reasons for this are, that these melts are not directly accessible and that experiments at in-situ conditions are extremely...
X-ray total scattering (TS), and its Fourier transform the pair distribution function (PDF), has become the method of choice for determining structural disorder within materials since the advent of high-energy synchrotron X-ray diffractometers. To date these techniques have not transferred to XFEL facilities because of their more modest (< 20 keV) beam energies. This is slowly changing, and...
Recently emerging as the next generation semiconductor materials strongly impacting photovoltaics and other relevant technological sectors, lead halide perovskites, LHPs, [APbX3, A = Cs+, CH3NH3+ (methylammonium, MA) or CH(NH2)2+, formamidinium, FA; X = Cl- , Br-, I-] have also been disruptive in the field of colloidally synthesized semiconducting nanocrystals. Bright and narrowband (< 100...
X-ray crystallography on macromolecular compounds has seen significant progress through X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) studies (Chapman et al., 2011, 2014; Schlichting, 2015). This is, among other things, because the short pulse durations of serial femtosecond crystallography essentially remove all effects of beam damage and atomic motion, and because the extreme brilliance reduces the...
The atomic pair distribution function method is growing in popularity as an approach for studying local structure in nanomaterials, amorphous materials, moleculare materials and liquids, as well as a growing interest in the study of local symmetry breaking in bulk crystals. It is a direct measure of the local structure in the vicinity of an atom. As such, it is a very interesting...
Glasses are formed when liquids are cooled fast enough and far enough [1]. Both criteria must be fulfilled to avoid crystallization during cooling, because thermodynamically, the crystalline state is always favorable. Therefore, thermodynamics alone cannot explain glass formation and the limiting cooling parameters are determined by the kinetic properties of a supercooled liquid. That is why...
Due to a lack of relevant experimental data, the physical mechanisms of non-equilibrium melting and solidification (crystallization or vitrification) of metals are not fully understood. Conventional structural probes remain useless for direct observations of those transitions as they occur on an ultrashort time scale, usually from pico- to nanoseconds. As a result, their current understanding...
Very hard XFEL radiation will enable a diversity of scattering studies of fundamental and functional behavior of quantum materials. With extreme pulsed magnetic fields (PMF) one may create novel electronic states, activate functional properties, and trigger non-equilibrium behavior, all of which can be probed by hard XFEL radiation. Competing charge and/or spin order in high-temperature...
A key aspect of molecular (photo-) catalysis is to optimize how much of the input energy is useful towards forming the desired photoproducts. For rational design of novel catalysts it is therefore of high importance to be able to determine how the input energy is re-distributed on internal and external Degrees of Freedom such as vibrational excitations and energy loss to the surroundings....
Modern ultrafast technologies have opened new perspectives in controlling bistable magnetic materials, where light can be used to switch between different phases and thus different properties [1]. Ultrafast photo-switching within bistability regimes indeed promises enhanced control of bistability down to ultrashort timescales.
Among the available bistable materials, Prussian Blue Analogues...
Since its inception in 1985 by Gerdau and coworkers at the storage ring DORIS (DESY, Hamburg), the excitation of Mössbauer transitions with x-rays from accelerator-driven sources became a widely used technique in many scientific disciplines at hard-x-ray synchrotrons worldwide, and recently also at XFEL sources.
So far, however, the method was focussed on Mössbauer isotopes with transition...
The use of polychromatic hard synchrotron radiation from insertion devices of high-energy storage rings such as The European Synchrotron - ESRF (France) or the Advanced Photon Source (USA) enables radioscopy with MHz repetition rates and nanosecond exposure time. Thanks to the availability of ultra-high speed cameras as well as highly dense scintillator materials with high light yield and...
Metallurgy has enabled technological innovation for millennia, but scientific uncertainties still limit progress in shifting the processes to sustainable alternatives at scale. Of the ~30% of global emissions that originate from our supply chain, >10% of those emissions originate from complex metallurgical processes understood predominantly at the process scale. From ore extraction to forging...
This talk reviews current limitations of XFEL scattering techniques and discusses potential impact of the very hard XFEL pulses on the structure determination, while presenting relevant experimental data taken at SACLA.
The first half of this talk reviews the XFEL-induced damage (sample heating [1,2] and ultrafast electron excitations [3,4]), which is inevitable when using focused X-ray...
Understanding intense XFEL interaction with matter is essential not only because of fundamental interest but also for interpreting experimental results. This presentation reviews recent experimental studies on intense x-ray interaction with matter using unique operation modes at SACLA (twin XFEL mode [1] and self-seeding mode [2]).
In particular, I will focus on XFEL-induced femtosecond...
The introduction of ultrafast and ultrabright X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) has allowed us to observe the structural illumination of biological macromolecules unattainable in synchrotron radiation sources at an unprecedented temporal and spatial resolution. Here we report the first near-physiological temperature structure of a large ribosomal subunit (50S) isolated from Thermus...
Abstract
The iron-sulfur (Fe-S) cluster assembly is an essential mechanism for sufficing cellular needs for the Iron sulfur clusters, the ancient small protein cofactors, found in various organisms. The iron-sulfur cluster assembly machinary is known to be correlated with diverse cellular functions including electron transfer, gene expression, regulation, nitrogen fixation, RNA modification...
The concept of high-harmonic lasing at X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) facilities [1] opens new perspectives of generating ultrashort SASE pulses in ultrahard X-ray range up to 100 keV. The European XFEL (EuXFEL) facility is the worldwide unique hard XFEL based on superconducting accelerator operating at an electron energy of up to 17.5 GeV and producing electron bunches at MHz repetition...
We are investigating the formation of metallophilic bonds in luminescent stimuli-responsive compounds based on ligand-supported Au(I)/Ag(I)/Cu(I) complexes upon electronic transition to the emissive excited state. Combining pump-probe X-ray absorption spectroscopy with high energy resolution (HERFD-XAS) and wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS) in the solution we can visualize the local...
X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) is a powerful tool for electronic structure characterization, it has been widely used in the study of 3d transition elements, while the K-edge XES spectra of 4d elements were rarely reported [1], even though they are greatly important for phase transition, photocatalyst, biology, geochemistry and etc. One of the main reasons for this is that the K emission...
Radiation damage is one of the major limitations of x-ray crystallography. XFELs provide ultrafast and ultrabright X-ray pulses allowing data collection without secondary radiation damage at ambient temperature. Here, we determined the crystal structure of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus-2 main protease by serial femtosecond x-ray crystallography. To compare the structural...
Determining the high-resolution biomacromolecular structure is crucial for understanding protein function and dynamics. Serial crystallography is a new structural biology technique, but it is constrained fundamentally by the need for large samples or by the need for quick access to the scarce X-ray beamtime. The key challenge in serial crystallography continues to be obtaining a large number...
Determining the high-resolution biomacromolecular structure is crucial for understanding protein function and dynamics. Serial crystallography is a new structural biology technique, but it is constrained fundamentally by the need for large samples or by the need for quick access to the scarce X-ray beamtime. The key challenge in serial crystallography continues to be obtaining a large number...
Traf6 is a protein which affects NF-KB mediated transcription, hence it has a role in proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis and other cellular processes. Recent research has shown that, various forms of pancreatic cancer is related to Traf6 function, making the protein a good therapeutic target. A novel dithiol agent named SN1 shows good promise as a Traf6 inhibitor, as it can reduce the...
The Structure of USP7 at Ambient Temperature by Using X-ray Crystallography
Nowadays cancer is a serious problem that doesn’t have very efficient treatment approaches. According to the world health organization (WHO) 10 million people died because of cancer in 2020. [1] Some mutations in DNA cause cancer and these cancer cells hide from cell cycle regulators and avoid cell death called...
We propose to develop, characterize and operate a superconducting undulator (SCU) afterburner consisting of 5 undulator modules (1 module = 2 times SCU coil of 2 m length and 1 phase shifter) at the SASE2 hard X-ray beamline of European XFEL. This afterburner has the potential to produce an output of more than 1010 ph/pulse at photon energies above 30 keV. The project is divided into the...
In recent years, molecular dynamics of macromolecules has benefitted immensely from the femtosecond timescales of X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFELs)$\mathrm{^{[1]}}$. However, the progress for small unit cell systems has been slow. Thus, Dr. L. Krause and B. Svane have developed a data reduction pipeline for small unit cell systems, including peak hunting, indexing, integration, and...
The Pair Distribution Function (PDF) method interprets Total Scattering data in real space [1]. This distinguishes local structure from the long-range average using information contained within diffuse scattering. xFEL facilities provide the potential to apply this tool to pump-probe experiments and local structural dynamics on the native (sub-)picosecond response timescale of a material. ...
Time-resolved X-ray methods are widely used for monitoring time-resolved electronic and structural dynamics over the course of photochemical reactions. Since fundamental processes in physics, chemistry and biology occur in ultrashort time range (from 10e-12 to 10e-15 s), X-ray free electrons lasers (XFELs) development received much more attention in the last ten years. Several experiments have...
Ultrasonic liquid phase exfoliation has been identified as a promising processing route for manufacturing 2D functional materials in large scale. The ultrasonic cavitation bubble implosion plays a critical role in enabling 2D layer exfoliation. However, due to the highly transient implosion process occurring at µm length and sub-µs time scale, many fundamental issues in this process are either...
There are some implications of the provision of higher photon energies at x-ray FEL facilities that are obvious: increased photon momentum allows greater exploration of reciprocal space. This is evidently important in our understanding of liquids under high dynamic pressure, where greater momentum transfer allows us to go beyond mere density measurements to provide specific information about...
The combination of X-ray free electron lasers with energetic and intense pulsed lasers has started to revolutionize the experimental investigation of matter at high energy densities comparable to the interiors of planets and stars and numerous applications transiently requiring such conditions. With future sources possibly going beyond the current world record set by EuXFEL at 25 keV, new...
Heavy elements (Z > 40) are of major importance for many fields of physics related to High-Energy Density Physics. For example, we commonly find them in all inertial confinement fusion related studies, in which the X-rays they generate are used to heat and compress DT capsules. On a broader scope, they are also extensively used are back lighters and tracers in many types of laser-matter...
Optical lasers are incredible tools able to deliver a lot of energy on a small volume, easily achieving the Warm Dense Matter and more in general High Energy Density regimes.
The use of this hot plasma to compress matter has been proved fundamental to reach conditions not only relevant to basic physics but also for material science, geophysics, astrophysics as well as inertial confinement...
The Pair Distribution Function (PDF) method interprets Total Scattering data in real space [1]. This distinguishes local structure from the long-range average using information contained within diffuse scattering. xFEL facilities provide the potential to apply this tool to pump-probe experiments and local structural dynamics on the native (sub-)picosecond response timescale of a material. ...
