Light in femtoseconds

Keith Nugent, a Federation Fellow, developed the idea of a collaborative centre in order to build up capacity in X-ray imaging in Australia.

Nugent has worked with biologists on developing microscopy techniques for many years, and has also worked in synchrotron-based phase contrast imaging. He is keen to harness the potential of the Australian Synchrotron, which is conveniently close.

"One thing we are doing in the centre is developing an imaging end-station which we'd ultimately like to set up at the Australian Synchrotron," he says.

"We currently don't have the necessary infrastructure in Australia and we will initially put it at the Advanced Photon Source in Chicago. However we are putting together a collaboration with universities around Australia to raise the money to bring the facility back to the Australian Synchrotron in a couple of years time."

Raising funds for a dedicated beamline at the Australian Synchrotron is also in the plan. CXS researchers already use the Australian Synchrotron, says the centre's chief operating officer, Tania Smith.

"We already use it to do some experiments but the Australian facility does not yet have all the facilities we need." Smith says. "We also have a memorandum of understanding with the CRC for Biomedical Imaging Development and we'll work with them on a project to build X-ray detectors for biological samples."

CXS works as a series of nodes, including the University of Melbourne, La Trobe University, Monash University and Swinburne University of Technology. CXS also has a major partnership with scientists in CSIRO, an activity that is treated as a CXS node, though it is funded by CSIRO. Each node specialises in different areas and the centre has access to a great array of equipment, including a new Femtosecond High-powered Laser Facility at Swinburne, about which Nugent is rather excited.

"It's a very high powered laser beam that produces pulses with durations of tens of femtoseconds," he says. "If you fire these pulses into a gas, coherent X-rays come out the other side; which is quite miraculous."

The centre is half-way through its five-year funding period but is planning to continue beyond this. At the end of that, the centre aims to have developed a novel imaging technique that will provide information on the structures of membrane proteins.

"We would like to have developed a flexible form of very high resolution microscopy," Nugent says. "We want to do imaging of cellular samples in three dimensions down to a resolution of 10 nanometers, which is 10 to 20 times better than we can achieve with the best confocal microscope. And also we'd like to have made a major contribution to the conceptual foundations of single molecule imaging."