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Electrons from Ultracold Atoms: a New Source for Diffractive Imaging
of Biomolecules
A/Professor Robert Scholten
School of Physics, University of Melbourne
3:30 pm Friday, 13 June 2008, EN101 (Ground Floor, EN Building),
Hawthorn.
“Ultracold plasma”
is almost an oxymoron. But neutral atoms can be laser-cooled to
microkelvin temperatures, and then photoionised, to produce an ultracold
plasma, with electron temperatures of a few Kelvin. From those cold
electrons, we can produce a beam of electron bunches with extremely
high spatial coherence, sufficient to enable diffractive determination
of structures the size of a protein molecule or even an entire virus
with sub-nm resolution. The cold atom technology at the heart of
the new source will also allow us to mediate the effects of space-charge
repulsion of the electrons within the beam, by shaping the atomic
cloud and hence the initial charge bunch.
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