The Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Science Instrument: Behind the Scenes

The Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Science (AMO) instrument is the first of six experimental stations now operating at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray laser. John Bozek, a staff scientist who manages the LCLS Soft X-ray Department, gives a tour behind the scenes at the AMO instrument. Samples used in AMO experiments include atoms, molecules, clusters, and nanoscale objects like protein crystals or viruses. Science performed at AMO includes fundamental studies of light-matter interactions in the extreme X-ray intensity of the LCLS pulse, time-resolved studies of increasingly charged states of atoms and molecules, X-ray diffraction imaging of nanocrystals, and single-shot imaging of a variety of objects.

Transcript

00:00:05 [Music] here at LS we have um six instruments built at the end of the free electron laser Each of which is purpose built to study a different system or a different phenomenon here in Amo the instrument was built to study the simplest forms of matter atoms and molecules and by that I mean free atoms and molecules I am John boac I'm an instrument

00:00:35 scientist here at lcls working for the uh Atomic and molecular and Optical physics instrument Atomic molecular and Optical physics uh implies by its name that we're dealing with atoms and molecules and even photons um to try and study how they all interact with each other you can think of it as the simplest forms of matter or simplest forms of of uh Gra ground state matter

00:01:01 atoms molecules so we're interested in how the intense beam of X-rays at the lcls interacts with those simple materials by doing those sorts of experiments on atoms and molecules we can build up the building blocks of understanding of how the X-ray pulse interacts with matter that then feeds into understanding more complex phenomena what we're really doing is

00:01:23 chemistry at the mechanistic level it's like we have Lego blocks and we're taking apart the chemical reactions with these Lego blocks and able to understand understand them in the simplest format so if we understand how the lcls F pulse interacts with an atom then using that information we can understand how the lcls pulse interacts with a biological Protein that's made up of a million

00:01:43 atoms and understand the results that we get from that better than we would if we just illuminated the the protein for the in the first place just like in education you learn a certain model of of of how the elements are put together out of protons and electrons and then as you advance in science you learn well that's not quite right it's a little more complex than that and it's the same

00:02:03 thing here we're trying to do the simplest experiments in in Amo the simplest things that we can imagine isolated atoms isolated molecules interacting with the with the light from the lcls so that we can really understand where all of the energy is going when we when we hit the atom or the molecule with the lcls [Music]

00:02:29 pulse and