Fig. 1: Schematic of the reaction path, the experimental setup and the mechanism of super-resolution.
a Reaction path and the relevant potential energy curves of ring-opening reaction of CHD. The red arrow indicates the direction of wave packet evolution. b Static molecular structure. The closest, second-nearest-neighbor, and diagonal C-C interatomic distances are designated as R1, R2, and R3, respectively. The pair distance distribution in CHD can be expressed as a sum of weighted (wm) δ-functions. c Experimental setup. The focused 273-nm laser pulse intersects with the electron beam on the sample delivered via a flow cell. The electron beam is compressed by a double bend achromat (DBA) system to reduce both the electron pulse width and arrival time jitter. d Experimental (red solid) and simulated (blue dotted) static modified molecular diffraction intensity (sM). e Experimental (red solid) and simulated (blue dotted) static pair distribution function (PDF). The brown, orange, and green lines represent R1, R2, and R3, respectively. f Schematic of super-resolved real-space inversion. The natural scattering kernels (NSKs) are obtained by computing the PDF of each atomic pair with a given distance under the experimental constraints. The weights (w) to be reconstructed can be determined through convex optimization. g Experimental (red) and simulated (blue) s-PDFs. The light blue columns represent the interatomic distance distribution of the sampled static structures from the simulation, scaled with the scattering cross sections of the atomic pairs. The error bars correspond to one standard deviation calculated from a bootstrapped data set. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.
