The bioscience nuclear microscopy program at LLNL

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 similar to 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.