Femtosecond diffractive imaging with a soft-X-ray free-electron laser

By Henry N. Chapman, A. Barty, M. Bogan, S. Boutet, M. Frank, S. Hau-Riege, Stefano Marchesini, B. Woods, S. Bajt, W. Benner and 24 more. 2006

966 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Theory predicts1,2,3,4 that, with an ultrashort and extremely bright coherent X-ray pulse, a single diffraction pattern may be recorded from a large macromolecule, a virus or a cell before the sample explodes and turns into a plasma. Here we report the first experimental demonstration of this principle using the FLASH soft-X-ray free-electron laser. An intense 25 fs, 4×1013 W cm−2 pulse, containing 1012 photons at 32 nm wavelength, produced a coherent diffraction pattern from a nanostructured non-periodic object, before destroying it at 60,000 K. A novel X-ray camera assured single-photon detection sensitivity by filtering out parasitic scattering and plasma radiation. The reconstructed image, obtained directly from the coherent pattern by phase retrieval through oversampling5,6,7,8,9, shows no measurable damage, and is reconstructed at the diffraction-limited resolution. A three-dimensional data set may be assembled from such images when copies of a reproducible sample are exposed to the beam one by one10.

Subfields: Radiation, Structural Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/820f07ae950b7b34ff8afd2aee09274882a235b2

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Citations in the corpus

Ultrafast single-shot diffraction imaging of nanoscale dynamics (2008, background): “, sufficient photons can be scattered from an isolated nanoscale object to perform coherent X-ray diffraction imaging using a single femtosecond-duration X-ray puls”
Coherent methods in the X-ray sciences (2009, background): “tly predict the diffraction patterns of molecules from intense free electron laser pulses. Nonetheless, some very interesting experimental work has been performed, with Chapman and colleagues showing [377] that a nanofabricated sample can be imaged with a coherent free111 electron laser pulse before”
Serial femtosecond crystallography: the first five years (2015, background): “…the soft X-ray FEL in Hamburg, by showing that a nanostructured non-periodic pattern cut in a silicon nitride membrane could be reconstructed by over-sampling techniques using diffraction data acquired with a 32 nm wavelength FEL pulse that destroyed the target upon exposure (Chapman et al., 2006).”
Keyhole coherent diffractive imaging (2008, neutral): “dtd" [ ]> The availability of third-generation synchrotrons and ultimately X-ray free-electron laser”
Operation of a free-electron laser from the extreme ultraviolet to the water window (2007, background): “The facility is hosting many international groups that are exploiting the unique aspects of this source in projects ranging from atomic physics and materials science to biolog”
A compact synchrotron radiation source driven by a laser-plasma wakefield accelerator (2008, background): “attract a large user community because they are extremely reliable sources of short radiation pulses that are tunable up to kilo-electron-volt photon energies, which make them useful for structural analysis of matte”
Phase Retrieval with Application to Optical Imaging: A contemporary overview (2015, background): “However, notwithstanding these challenges, successful phase retrieval of experimental data in optical imaging has been widely achieved [3], [13], [16], [17], [23], [28], [80], [119], [120].”
Femtosecond x rays from laser-plasma accelerators (2013, neutral): “…community, large-scale free-electron laser facilities can now deliver the brightest x-ray beams ever, with unprecedented novel possibilities (Neutze et al. , 2000; Chapman et al. , 2006; Brock, 2007; Fritz et al. , 2007; Gaffney and Chapman, 2007; Barty et al. , 2008; Marchesini et al. , 2008).”
Coherent X-Ray Diffraction Imaging (2012, methodology): “Also, the short pulse duration of XFELs potentially allows acquisition of the diffraction pattern from a biomolecule before it is destroyed [140].”