Future Prospectus

The above discussion gives the ongoing activities of the group. There are four new labs being built up that are slated to come on line by the summer of 2011. One lab is dedicated to the development of a relativistic electron gun to increase the electron bunch density by an order of magnitude and push the time resolution down to less than 50 fs. This facility is also being used as a test bed for electron gun development and electronic synchronization that will be of benefit to the European X-FEL. Two other nonrelativistic electron guns will provide the ability to study gas phase and surface reaction dynamics. The fourth lab focuses on quantum state dynamics and will be the home to a full suite of optical wavelengths ranging from the UV to IR with full control over electric fields with few femtosecond time resolution and multidimensional capabilities to provide complementary frequency/quantum state correlation information.

The research program has been focusing on solid state physics issues as test cases towards the ultimate goal of studying the structure-function correlation in biological systems. The new high brightness electron guns will now enable the study a number of biological systems and effectively open up nearly all chemical reaction dynamics to exploration with electron structural probes. The electron source development is highly complementary to the FEL scientific focus. There are certain systems that can not be studied with electrons due to constraints in sample conditions. Here X-rays are the only choice. To enable exploitation of the full brightness of 4th generation light sources, the group has developed a photocrystallography chip concept that makes it possible to mount up to 1 M microcrystals in an ordered array within seconds [Anal. Chem. 2010 in press, DOI: 10.1021/ac1021024]. This latter development could be quite important in opening up both the study of nanocrystals but also time resolved studies using X-FELs in which a minimum basis of some 10,000 protein crystals (or different locations) are needed to construct a full time sequence of motions at the atomic level of resolution. Recent beam time at the LCLS in collaboration with the Schlichting group (MPG-ASG) has shown that it is possible to use the full brightness of the X-ray source with this new chip concept. The first femtosecond time resolved protein structural dynamics were conducted as well as the first step towards resolving the structure-function relationship in biological molecules.