Using SLAC’s X-ray laser, researchers have made detailed 3-D images of nanoscale biology, with future applications in the study of air pollution, combustion and catalytic processes.
When created with X-ray light, holography can be an extremely useful method for capturing high-resolution images of a nanoscale object—something that is so small, its size is measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter.
In the new study, the authors superimposed scattered X-ray light from the virus with scattered X-ray light from a reference nano-sized sphere. The curvature in the superimposed images from the two objects provided depth information and details about the shape of the 450-nanometer-wide virus, the mimivirus. This technique greatly simplified the interpretation of the data.
“Instead of thousands of steps and algorithms that potentially don’t match up, you have a two-step procedure where you clearly get the structure out of your image,” says lead study author Tais Gorkhover, a Panofsky Fellow at SLAC and researcher at the Stanford PULSE Institute.
Now, the scientists can do their reconstruction of a sample in fractions of a second or even faster with the holographic method.
“Another advantage of the in-flight holography method is that it is less prone to noise and to the artifacts that can appear in the detector compared to non-holographic X-ray imaging,” says Anatoli Ulmer, a co-author and PhD student from the Technical University of Berlin in Germany.
In the long run, the researchers predict that in-flight holography will offer new ways to study air pollution, combustion and catalytic processes, all of which involve nanoparticles.
An international team of scientists from the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley and Brookhaven national laboratories, the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, the Czech Academy of Science, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany, the Institute of Optics and Atomic Physics in Germany, the Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics in Hungary, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, Northwestern University and Uppsala University in Sweden also contributed to this research.