Development of a Tunable, Monochromatic X-ray Device with the Addition of a Beamline for Protein Crystallography at the Vanderbilt MFEL Facility

摘要

A new, compact, 'tabletop' laser synchrotron X-ray device has been developed. It produces pulsed, tunable, monochromatic X-rays in 8-10 ps bursts. These X-rays emanate from the unit in a conebeam geometry from an effective focal spot of 50 microns. The X-rays produced are tunable from 12-50 keV with each 'shot' delivering 10(exp 10) photons. The unit utilizes a linear accelerator running in the single pulse mode and a tabletop terawatt laser integrated in such a way, that the X-rays are produced using the phenomenon of inverse Compton scattering. This device is used in a shirtsleeves environment, without the need for a shielded vault. The electron beam and laser beam are counterpropagated in a head-on collision yielding the tunable X-ray photons. The prototype unit has been designed, built and commissioned at the W.M. Keck Free Electron Laser Facility at Vanderbilt University, where it is now used for imaging animals, phantoms, and tissue specimens. A 1.5-meter long protein crystallography beam line has been designed and built for elucidation of 3- dimensional structures of protein crystals. This beam line is to be mated to an even smaller second-generation machine in a proteomics laboratory at the same MFEL facility.