50 NSEC ENCODING SR PROTEIN CRYSTALLOGRAPHY DETECTORS

x射线晶体学是目前研究的主要技术

X-ray crystallography is the principal technique currently employed to study the structure of biological proteins. These proteins are known to assume intermediate structures in the course of biochemical reactions such as enzyme activity and the details of these conformation changes are critical to a precise understanding of the relationships between chemical structure, physical topology and biochemical activity. Since the intermediate states are transient, time resolved crystallography is required to study them. There will be sufficient x-ray flux available at the next generation of storage rings to carry out these studies in the time regime between msec and nsec, provided that integrating 2D detectors can be devised which can be read out in the time between the 100 psec x-ray bursts produced by the storage ring at about 100 nsec intervals. High quality integrating detectors exist, in the form of CCDs for example, but they are limited by their sequential readout schemes. This work will address this problem by working to develop a readout scheme which can read out all the pixels of a 2D detector in parallel (1 frame) and store their contents in temporary memory until the end of an experiment, about 100 frames, when all the data can be transferred to permanent storage at leisure.