The bioscience nuclear microscopy program at LLNL

Abstract

Since initiation in mid 1994, a bioscience nuclear microscopy program at Livermore has enabled collaboration with bio-scientists on a variety of projects requiring quantitative elemental microanalysis. For microprobe analysis a combination of PIXE and STIM are typically used, respectively generating element distribution maps with micron scale spatial resolution, and projected densities and histological information with sub-micron spatial resolution. Current studies demonstrate the applicability of nuclear microscopy (particularly when combined with other analysis techniques) in environmental tracing, toxicology, carcinogenesis, and structural biology. The program currently uses ∼ 10 percent of the available time on a 10 MV tandem accelerator that is also applied to a variety of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry and other microprobe programs. The completion of a dedicated nuclear microprobe system, using a 5 SDH NEC 1.7 MV tandem accelerator and employing several energy dispersive X-ray detectors to improve X-ray counting rates, promises increased accelerator access, greater sample throughput and continued expansion of the program.