In a step that overturns traditional
assumptions and practice, researchers at the Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research, Mumbai and Institute for Plasma Research, Gandhi
Nagar have fashioned bacteria to emit intense, hard x-ray radiation.
When one thinks of hard x-rays and bacteria it is usually that the
bacteria are at the receiving end of the x-ray source -- being imaged,
irradiated for some modification or simply assessed for radiation
damage. One hardly thinks of using bacteria as a source of x-rays, far
from turning them into the brightest among such sources.
The experiment consists of a femtosecond, infrared, high intensity laser irradiating a glass slide coated with E. coli
bacterial cells, turning the cell material into a hot, dense plasma.
Laser driven plasmas have been known to be very useful table top x-ray
sources and efforts are constantly being made to improve their
brightness. One such effort, an important one, has been to create
plasmas on a nanostructured surface where the nanostructure amplifies
the incident intensity by electromagnetic local field enhancement.
The present advance has been made possible by the insight the
researchers had when they realized that natural micro and nanostructures
in the bacteria can be readily used for such intensity enhancement
leading to hotter, brighter plasma. They showed that the bacterial cells
increased the x-ray flux by a factor of 100 in the 50 -- 300 keV x-ray
region [1]. Further they grow the bacterial cells in a silver chloride
solution whereby the silver atoms aggregated as nanoparticles inside the
cell. They could then use these bacteria spiked with nanoparticles to
boost the emission another 100 times, leading to an overall enhancement
of 10,000 times from the flux emitted by plain glass slides without the
bacterial coating. This is the highest conversion of laser light to hard
x-rays ever achieved.
This lateral stride could potentially lead to biologically inspired
plasma physics and high energy density science with myriad applications
among novel particle sources, creation of extreme excited states and
related areas.
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from
materials provided by
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
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