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arXiv · 2102.02899

Optical funnel to guide and focus virus particles for X-ray laser imaging

Salah Awel·Sebastian Lavin-Varela·Nils Roth·Daniel A. Horke·Andrei V. Rode·Richard A. Kirian·Jochen Küpper·Henry N. Chapman
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Abstract

The need for precise manipulation of nanoparticles in gaseous or near-vacuum environments is encountered in many studies that include aerosol morphology, nanodroplet physics, nanoscale optomechanics, and biomolecular physics. Photophoretic forces, whereby momentum exchange between a particle and surrounding gas is induced with optical light, were recently shown to be a robust means of trapping and manipulating nanoparticles in air. We previously proposed a photophoretic "optical funnel" concept for the delivery of bioparticles to the focus of an x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) beam for femtosecond x-ray diffractive imaging. Here, we describe the formation of a high-aspect-ratio optical funnel and provide a first experimental demonstration of this concept by transversely compressing and concentrating a high-speed beam of aerosolized viruses by a factor of three in a low-pressure environment. These results pave the way toward improved sample delivery efficiency for XFEL imaging experiments as well as other forms of imaging and spectroscopy.

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Salah Awel, Sebastian Lavin-Varela, Nils Roth, Daniel A. Horke, Andrei V. Rode, Richard A. Kirian, Jochen Küpper, Henry N. Chapman. 2021-02-04. Optical funnel to guide and focus virus particles for X-ray laser imaging. https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.02899

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