Ph.D. Theses

Biomolecules and their reactions are of great interest because they are important for the functions in our body and thus for health. The structure of a molecule defines its function, and in this work we demonstrate the crucial steps that will allow direct recording of structural information from large biological molecules through gas-phase x-ray di↵raction. [...]

Tremendous effort has recently been put into the development of novel methods and techniques in the realm of serial-femtosecond x-ray crystallography (SFX) and x-ray free-electron lasers (XFEL). This thesis strives to contribute to current research approaches. [...]

The highly brilliant, short and coherent pulses produced by X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) opened up a unique opportunity to image small objects in nature, such as protein macromolecules, clusters, viruses and nanoparticles with nearly atomic spatial resolution, and their dynamic processes can be probed with femtosecond temporal resolution. Single-particle imaging (SPI) is a coherent diffraction imaging technique at XFELs that consists of directing a stream of randomly oriented isolated bio-particles across the focus of the X-ray beam to construct high-resolution 3D structure from diffraction patterns of multiple identical particles. [...]

Extended objects such as line or surface operators, interfaces or boundaries play an important role in conformal field theory. Here we propose a systematic approach tothe relevant conformal blocks which are argued to coincide with the wave functions of an integrable multi-particle Calogero-Sutherland problem. [...]

X-ray crystallography is a very powerful tool to study the structure of biological molecules such as proteins. Knowledge of the three-dimensional structure of such molecules aids the understanding of biological processes and as such how life works. [...]

With the recent developments of modern synchrotron and X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) light sources high speed and micrometer sized liquid jets have become one of the most important sample delivery systems. For that reason it is highly important to develop liquid jet devices compatible with micrometer X-ray beams, which are optimized for the investigation of nanostructures and the behavior of complex liquids behavior under flow.This thesis reports a detailed X-ray scattering study of a liquid jet produced by a gas dynamic virtual nozzle (GDVN) system. [...]

Modern particle physics at colliders demands for a continuous increase of the luminosityfor colliding particle beams in order to study rare events. The requirementsfor the performance of the particle detectors are increasing while the detectors aresubject to unprecedented fluences of particles. [...]

The main aim of dissertation is to develop an experimentally verified computational fluid dynamic (CFD) model of micron-sized liquid jet, produced by an injection molded Gas Dynamic Virtual Nozzle (GDVN). In these nozzles, liquid jets are efficiently orientedlytransporting mass and momentum [...]