Backstory: Marc Messerschmidt, Staff Scientist

i think

beamline scientist has been a dream

since it's actually quite some time in

my life they have

a new topic new users every week and

uh then a lot of technical

questions that you have to address and

and both is is pretty interesting

i'm mark messerschmitt uh i'm a staff

scientist i with the

cxi experiment at lcls

we're doing nanocrystallography and

imaging and a little bit of material

science

the name is right now a little

misleading

cxi is the coherent x-ray imaging

experiment imaging is really just

a small part of what we do that's that's

why it's now misleading that's what we

built everything for

but we do so much nanocrystallography

that

the sea should be changed to

crystallography i would say

all all the stuff scientists are experts

on the beam line that they work and in

many cases

that expertise goes beyond the single

beam line is there's a lot of aspects

that are

much more facility related than than

strictly associated with just a single

beam line

at cxi we have one big poster child

experiment and that's that's the imaging

the

idea is you take a single molecule and

uh you just hit it with enough x-rays

that

uh within one single burst you get what

we call a diffraction pattern

and if you're clever enough and you have

enough pictures of that kind

you can actually come up with this 3d

structure

from that particular experiment because

you have only a single molecule

this turns out to be very hard

doing the experiments we do the

structural

science that we do in its applications

we learned a lot of things

but uh we are certainly still in the

face of

understanding the real details and

tweaking the system to get the

experiments better and better

is a real exciting part of my job