'Fast' X-ray Lenses for Biomedical Applications

描述(由申请人提供)： 基于X射线的技术在医疗保健和生物医学研究中发挥着关键和重要的作用。X射线照相是最重要和应用最广泛的医学诊断方法之一，可以追溯到100多年前X射线的发明。X射线蛋白质结晶学是确定蛋白质等大分子结构的唯一最有用的工具，特别是对于分子量超过30kD的蛋白质。最近，软X射线冷冻显微镜已被证明可以提供单个生物细胞的非破坏性高分辨率三维断层成像，其二维分辨率约为25 nm，三维分辨率约为60 nm。生物标本中的重要微量元素，如细胞或组织，可以使用由Pi和他在Argonne国家实验室的同事开发的基于同步加速器的X射线荧光显微镜，以高于十亿分之一的空间分辨率绘制地图，空间分辨率约为100 nm。我们建议开发一种“快速”X射线透镜，它将极大地提高上述所有X射线技术的性能，这些技术受到目前可用的X射线透镜的限制。所提出的“快速”X射线透镜是一种衍射波带片透镜，其最外层的区域宽度约为7 nm，并且其厚度针对在大能量范围内工作的所需X射线能量进行了优化。我们建议分两个阶段完成这项计划。第一阶段项目的目标是证明所提出的技术方法的技术可行性，第二阶段项目的目标是制造最外区宽度为7 nm的波带片原型，所需厚度不受制造技术的限制。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): X-ray based technology plays a critical and important role in healthcare and biomedical research. X-ray radiography is one of the most important and widely deployed medical diagnostic methods that can be traced back to the invention of x-rays more than 100 years ago. X-ray protein crystallography is the single most useful tool to determine macromolecule structures such as proteins, especially for molecular weights above about 30kD. Recently, soft x-ray cryo-microscopy has been demonstrated to offer non-destructive high resolution three dimensional tomographic imaging of single biological cells with a resolution of about 25 nm in 2-D and 60 nm in 3-D. Important trace elements in a biological specimen such as a cell or tissue can be mapped with sensitivity better than parts per billion at a spatial resolution of about 100 nm using a synchrotron based x-ray fluorescence microscope developed by the PI and his colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory. We propose to develop a 'fast' x-ray lens that will drastically improve the performance of all the x-ray techniques described above, which are limited by the currently available x-ray lenses. The proposed 'fast' x-ray lens is a diffractive zone plate lens with an outermost zone width of about 7 nm and with a thickness optimized for a desired x-ray energy working over a large range of energies. We propose to complete the project in two phases. The goal of the phase I project is to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the proposed technical approach and the goal of the phase II project is to fabricate prototype zone plates with a 7 nm outermost zone width with a desired thickness not limited by the fabrication technique.