September 2024. Treesa joins the group.
News
June 2024. Bryan attends the Ultrafast X-ray Summer School at Stanford.
May 2024. Claudiu gives an invited lecture at the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest, in Romania.
April 2024. Claudiu gets tenure!
March-April 2024.
We traveled to the SLAC National Laboratory to conduct a X-ray laser beamtime on the freezing of supercooled water drops.
This one was an adventure, but in the last day we got the better calibrated X-ray diffraction data we were looking for.
This one was an adventure, but in the last day we got the better calibrated X-ray diffraction data we were looking for.
January 2024. Claudiu gives an invited talk at the Molecular Water Science Workshop at EuXFEL in Germany.
November 2023. We all went to the APS-DFD conference in Washington, DC. Armin and Claudiu gave talks on measuring negative pressures in water, and on the kinetics of freezing in supercooled water drops.
October 2023. Claudiu gives an invited talk at the UK X-ray laser meeting on materials, chemistry and biology at extreme conditions, in Glasgow, Scotland.
September 2023. The paper on freezing drops was covered by more than 30 outlets in 12 countries.
Armin also gets a personal recognition - her hometown's newspaper prints an article on her and her research!
Armin also gets a personal recognition - her hometown's newspaper prints an article on her and her research!
September 2023. Armin presents our work on the freezing of supercooled water drops, at the LCLS users' conference at SLAC.
August 2023. We have a new paper in Nature, about the freezing of supercooled water drops!
In this study, we recorded X-ray diffraction from freezing drops using an X-ray laser, and we observed how ice becomes a crystal with long-range order. This ice has a special metastable structure with a large microscopic strain. To obtain this result, we needed a very fine time resolution, which we achieved by using the X-ray laser plus a new model for the freezing of drops. This model has seven stages and describes how ice grows inside the drops, deforming and sometimes shattering the drops.
In this study, we recorded X-ray diffraction from freezing drops using an X-ray laser, and we observed how ice becomes a crystal with long-range order. This ice has a special metastable structure with a large microscopic strain. To obtain this result, we needed a very fine time resolution, which we achieved by using the X-ray laser plus a new model for the freezing of drops. This model has seven stages and describes how ice grows inside the drops, deforming and sometimes shattering the drops.
June 2023. Bryan joins the group.
April 2023. School of Arts and Sciences annual student awards. Sebastian is recognized as one of the CARR Academic Scholars, and is also awarded the Betty Skuse Thompson Prize in Physics.
Congratulations!
January 2023.
We have a paper accepted in Phys. Rev. Fluids, which describes and explains how supercooled drops move spontaneously when they freeze.
Bottom line, the freezing drops act like little rockets! This paper was covered by the Physics Magazine of APS, and by other news outlets.
Bottom line, the freezing drops act like little rockets! This paper was covered by the Physics Magazine of APS, and by other news outlets.
November 2022. The APS-DFD conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. Armin and Claudiu each deliver talks on cool features of supercooled freezing drops.
May 2022. School of Arts and Sciences annual student awards. Max is awarded the Charles Pine Memorial Fund Award, and Thomas is awarded the Betty Skuse Thompson Prize in Physics.
Max and Thomas graduate, and both will start their Ph.D. in Physics. Congratulations!
March 2022. Claudiu gives an invited talk at the APS March meeting, on shock trains in liquid jets and their effect on protein crystals.
February 2022. Sebastian joins the group.
February 2022. We were awarded a three-year NSF grant to study ultrafast cavitation in liquids with X-ray lasers!
November 2021. The APS-DFD conference in Phoenix, Arizona. Armin delivered a talk on imaging X-ray laser induced shocks in liquid drops, and Claudiu delivered a talk on the effects of shocks in liquid microjets on protein crystals.
July 2021. X-ray beamtime at SLAC, with collaborators from the Linac Coherent Light Source. Armin and Claudiu traveled to California for a beamtime to capture the solidification of electrospun polymer fibers. It was great to do in-person experimental work again: high-speed imaging, setting up the X-ray setup and diagnostics, and recording femtosecond X-ray diffraction data.
April 2021. Thomas and Max have been accepted in the Department of Energy's undergraduate research program at national labs (SULI) for this summer. Even better, they will work with teams from SLAC on projects involving X-ray lasers. Congratulations!
March 2021. A second paper is published in Nature Communications on the effect of shock waves on protein crystals, using the special setup at LCLS in California. In shocked hemoglobin crystals, a new phenomenon was observed: the ordering of the crystal was not affected, but the protein molecules themselves changed slightly their shape.
January 2021. New paper in Physical Review Research. After many experimental efforts with our Max Planck Institute collaborators over a few years, we finally report the observation of a phenomenon we predicted five years ago: protein crystals can be damaged by shock waves generated by X-ray laser pulses in liquid microjets. In this expeirment, we observed that the crystalline ordering of lysozyme crystals is degraded after they are shocked at several hundred atmospheres of pressure. The experiment was done at LCLS in California, using a special setup that simulated conditions that will be encountered at the next-generation X-ray lasers such as the European XFEL.
January 2021. Max joins the group.
December 2020. A paper from our collaboration with the Max Planck Institute reports on a second round of serial crystallograpy experiments done at the European XFEL, and proposes a new method to detect possible crystal damage due to shock waves at megahertz XFELs.
December 2020. The first paper from our new collaboration with the ELI-NP petawatt laser facility in Romania reports in Physical Review Fluids how to make shock trains in liquid jets using simple green nanosecond lasers.
September 2020. Thomas joins the group.
August 2020. Armin receives the departmental teaching award. Congratulations!
February 2020. We have a new paper, based on experiments we did at the SACLA X-ray laser in Japan, on measuring the waveform of shock waves generated by X-ray lasers in water.
January 2020. Beamtime at a new facility! We ran experiments on the laser ablation of liquid microjets at the ELI-NP petawatt laser facility in Romania.
August 2019. Matias joins the group.
May 2019. Our recent Physical Review Fluids paper fuels a viral science story about very loud sounds: we found more than 300 mentions of our work, on websites from 52 countries!
May 2019. Armin joins the group.
April 2019.
We have a brand new lab space!
April 2019. Our analysis of how shocks propagate in liquid jets and generate very intense sound is published in Physical Review Fluids and is selected as an Editor's Suggestion.
April 2019.
The second of the two short-format beamtimes at the EuXFEL.
March 2019.
Claudiu participates in the first of two short-format beamtimes at the EuXFEL with our collaborators from Max Planck Institute, to identify possibly adverse effects of XFEL-induced shock waves in MHz repetition rate experiments; then, he delivers a few invited presentations in Bucharest.
January 2019. Dory joins the group; Ahmed graduates.
November 2018. Claudiu attends the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting, and presents work on the propagation of shock waves in liquid jets.
September 2018. Ahmed joins the group, and starts to investigate how supercooled water drops freeze.
September 2018. Results from the April EuXFEL beamtime, which was a large collaboration, have been published in Nature Communications.
August 2018.
The results from our beamtime in July, done with our collaborators from Max Planck and EuXFEL, have been published in Nature Communications.
August 2018.
The renovation of the new lab has officially started!
July 2018. Claudiu attends the Gordon Research Conference on Water and Aqueous Solutions, where he was a discussion leader and presented recent work on water at negative pressures.
June 2018.
Another beamtime at EuFXEL in Germany, this time with our colleagues form Max Planck Institute. This beamtime was also focused on developing methods to do protein crystallography at MHz repetition rates.
April 2018.
XFEL beamtime at EuFXEL in Germany. We were part of a large team led by scientists the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science in Hamburg, and our goal was to show that using the newest XFELs, protein cystallography experiments can be run at MHz repetition rates.
Feb 2018.
XFEL beamtime at LCLS in California, in collaboration with the Schlichting group at the Max Planck Institute. We used double X-ray laser pulses to simulate how a femtosecond protein crystallography experiment behaves at very higy repetition rates (>1 MHz), and investigate if the crystals are damaged before their diffraction is recorded.
Jan 2018. Claudiu joins the faculty of the Physics Department at Rutgers-Newark.