Update on SRC Infrared Beamline
Examining kinetics of living cells such as phytoplankton, fungi and bacteria-mineral interactions requires the ability to image sufficiently large sample areas encompassing even large whole cells quickly on biological time scales. The brilliance of the synchrotron is critical to provide sufficient flux density to obtain diffraction limited images on such short time scales (in under a minute). Most conventional infrared beamlines at synchrotron facilities developed for microspectroscopy imaging are based on confocal microscopes and use raster scanning. Although this technique generates high-quality diffraction-limited images it has the major shortcoming of relatively long acquisition times (several hours).
The University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee has designed a novel mid-infrared (IR) beamline for Microspectroscopic Imaging using a Multi-Element Detector, IRMSI-MED, that extracts 320 hor. x 25 vert. mrad2 from a dedicated bending magnet (BM). As depicted by 12 laser beams in the photograph above, BM radiation is collected with 12 toroidal mirrors, redirected by plane mirrors, collimated by paraboloidal mirrors and rearranged by another set of small plane mirrors. The collimated bunch of beams will illuminate a spot of 60 x 40 microns at the sample plane of a commercial IR microscope. At present, the beamline will be installed at the SRC in May 2008, and will be commissioned immediately.
This project has a potential to impact a wide variety of research areas ranging from soft matter condensed physics, nanoscience, biology, chemistry, veterinary science, engineering, environmental science and geology.
This project has been funded by a NSF-MRI, DMR# 0619759.