Publications by Marcel Drabbels

Direct measurement of the critical cooling rate for the vitrification of water

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Nathan Junior Mowry

The vitrification of aqueous solutions through rapid cooling is a remarkable achievement that launched the field of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and has enabled the cryopreservation of biological specimens. For judging the feasibility of a vitrificat ...

2025

Sealed Samples for High-resolution, Microsecond Cryo-EM

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Sarah Victoria Barrass

Oxford University Press (OUP)2025

Correction to: Electron diffraction of deeply supercooled water in no man’s land (Nature Communications, (2023), 14, 1, (2812), 10.1038/s41467-023-38520-7)

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Gabriele Bongiovanni, Nathan Junior Mowry

Correction to: Nature Communicationshttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38520-7, published online 17 May 2023 In the version of the article initially published, Supplementary Note J on determination of the location of the hypothetical Widom line was not inc ...

2025

Shaped Laser Pulses for Microsecond Time-Resolved Cryo-EM: Outrunning Crystallization during Flash Melting

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Nathan Junior Mowry

Water vitrifies if cooled at rates above 3 × 105 K/s. In contrast, when the resulting amorphous ice is flash heated, crystallization occurs even at a more than 10 times higher heating rate, as we have recently shown. This may present an issue for microseco ...

2024

Flash Melting Amorphous Ice

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Gabriele Bongiovanni, Nathan Junior Mowry

Water can be vitrified if it is cooled at high rates, which makes it possible to outrun crystallization in so-called no man’s land, a range of deeply supercooled temperatures where water crystallizes rapidly. Here, we study the reverse process in pure wate ...

2024

Electron diffraction of deeply supercooled water in no man’s land

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Gabriele Bongiovanni, Nathan Junior Mowry

A generally accepted understanding of the anomalous properties of water will only emerge if it becomes possible to systematically characterize water in the deeply supercooled regime, from where the anomalies appear to emanate. This has largely remained elu ...

Nature Research2023

Fast viral dynamics revealed by microsecond time-resolved cryo-EM

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Oliver Florian Harder, Sarah Victoria Barrass

Observing proteins as they perform their tasks has largely remained elusive, which has left our understanding of protein function fundamentally incom- plete. To enable such observations, we have recently proposed a technique that improves the time resoluti ...

Nature Research2023

Near-atomic resolution reconstructions from in situ revitrified cryo samples

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Gabriele Bongiovanni, Jonathan Mark Voss, Oliver Florian Harder

A microsecond time-resolved version of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has recently been introduced to enable observation of the fast conformational motions of proteins. The technique involves locally melting a cryo sample with a laser beam to allow the ...

2023

Microsecond melting and revitrification of cryo samples with a correlative light-electron microscopy approach

Marcel Drabbels, Gabriele Bongiovanni, Oliver Florian Harder

We have recently introduced a novel approach to time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) that affords microsecond time resolution. It involves melting a cryo sample with a laser beam to allow dynamics of the embedded particles to occur. Once the la ...

2022

Accurate time zero determination in an ultrafast transmission electron microscope without energy filter

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Pavel Olshin, Jonathan Mark Voss

In this manuscript, we describe a simple and accurate method for finding the temporal overlap of the laser pump and electron probe pulse in ultrafast TEM. Our approach is based on the observation that the outline of a nanoparticle blurs at time zero, a phe ...

AIP American Institute of Physics2022

Diffraction imaging of light induced dynamics in xenon-doped helium nanodroplets

Marcel Drabbels, Daniela Rupp, Andrew Daniel Bonnar Clark, Verónica Oliver Álvarez de Lara

2022

Visualizing Nanoscale Dynamics with Time-resolved Electron Microscopy

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Pavel Olshin

The large number of interactions in nanoscale systems leads to the emergence of complex behavior. Understanding such complexity requires atomic-resolution observations with a time resolution that is high enough to match the characteristic timescale of the ...

2022

The fragmentation mechanism of gold nanoparticles in water under femtosecond laser irradiation

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Pavel Olshin, Gabriele Bongiovanni, Jonathan Mark Voss, Chengcheng Yan

Plasmonic nanoparticles in aqueous solution have long been known to fragment under irradiation with intense ultrafast laser pulses, creating progeny particles with diameters of a few nanometers. However, the mechanism of this process is still intensely deb ...

2021

Evolution and ion kinetics of a XUV-induced nanoplasma in ammonia clusters

Marcel Drabbels, Andrew Daniel Bonnar Clark, Verónica Oliver Álvarez de Lara

High-intensity extreme ultraviolet (XUV) pulses from a free-electron laser can be used to create a nanoplasma in clusters. In reference Michiels et al (2020 Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 22 7828-34) we investigated the formation of excited states in an XUV-induc ...

IOP Publishing2021

Ultrafast Resonant Interatomic Coulombic Decay Induced by Quantum Fluid Dynamics

Marcel Drabbels, Daniela Rupp, Andrew Daniel Bonnar Clark, Verónica Oliver Álvarez de Lara

Interatomic processes play a crucial role in weakly bound complexes exposed to ionizing radiation; therefore, gaining a thorough understanding of their efficiency is of fundamental importance. Here, we directly measure the timescale of interatomic Coulombi ...

American Physical Society2021

High-Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy with Bright Microsecond Electron Pulses

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Pavel Olshin, Gabriele Bongiovanni

Transmission electron microscopy at atomic-resolution is a crucial tool in a variety of fields, ranging from materials science to biology. [1,2] Fast electron cameras have recently enabled high-speed observations atomic resolution. [3] Moreover, they have ...

2021

Rapid melting and revitrification as an approach to microsecond time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Pavel Olshin, Jonathan Mark Voss, Oliver Florian Harder

Proteins typically undergo dynamics on the microsecond to millisecond timescale, which is much faster than the time resolution of cryo-electron microscopy. Here, we propose a novel approach for microsecond time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy that involv ...

Elsevier2021

Microsecond melting and revitrification of cryo samples

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Pavel Olshin, Jonathan Mark Voss, Oliver Florian Harder

The dynamics of proteins that are associated with their function typically occur on the microsecond timescale, orders of magnitude faster than the time resolution of cryo-electron microscopy. We have recently introduced a novel approach to time-resolved cr ...

AIP Publishing2021

Atomic-Resolution Imaging of Fast Nanoscale Dynamics with Bright Microsecond Electron Pulses

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Pavel Olshin, Gabriele Bongiovanni

Atomic-resolution electron microscopy is a crucial tool to elucidate the structure of matter. Recently, fast electron cameras have added the time domain to high-resolution imaging, allowing static images to be acquired as movies from which sample drift can ...

American Chemical Society (ACS)2020

Characterization of a time-resolved electron microscope with a Schottky field emission gun

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Pavel Olshin

The rapid growth of the field of time-resolved and ultrafast electron microscopy has been accompanied by the active development of new instrumentation. Recently, time-resolved microscopes equipped with a field emission gun have been introduced, demonstrati ...

2020