Microscopic Linear Liquid Streams in Vacuum: Injection of Solvated Biological Samples into X-Ray Free Electron Lasers

摘要

Microscopic linear liquid free-streams offer a means of gently delivering biological samples into a probe beam in vacuum while maintaining the sample species in a fully solvated state. By employing gas dynamic forces to form the microscopic liquid stream (as opposed to a conventional solid-walled convergent nozzle), liquid free-streams down to 300 nm diameter have been generated. Such "Gas Dynamic Virtual Nozzles" (GDVN) are ideally suited to injecting complex biological species into an X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) to determine the structure of the biological species via Serial Femtosecond Crystallography (SFX). GDVN injector technology developed for this purpose is described.