Imaging CoE postdoc Daniel Langley spent a week in sunny California working with a team of scientists from around the world, who were trying to film the motion and interaction of atoms and molecules.

Daniel is one of our resident nanofabrication researchers working out of the La Trobe node. He jumped on a plane at the start of Science Week Australia headed for the Linac Coherent Light Source to meet with the international Single Particle Initiative team.

Over the week and a half Daniel worked closely with the team learning how to build, run and maintain aerodynamic lens injector systems for use in XFEL experiments. The injection team, lead by Johan Bielecki, Uppsala University, invited Daniel to join the small team of people responsible for providing sample delivery for the Single Particle Initiative.

The Single Particle Initiative is a large international collaboration including over 100 researchers globally and more than 20 Universities, companies and research institutes. Their aim is to push the boundaries of coherent diffractive imaging to explore the atomic structure of soft materials including biological samples.

Daniel kept us up-to-date with the team’s progress through short video blogs during the week.

All his diaries were posted to this page will post them to this page, on our YouTube channel and share them on our Twitter feed — @ImagingCoE — in real time and are now here, all together for your viewing pleasure.

#SingleParticleImaging @dplangley @ImagingCoE