Abstract
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.
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Acknowledgements
We owe special thanks to the scientific and technical staff of FLASH at The Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, Hamburg, in particular to J. Feldhaus, R. L. Johnson, U. Hahn, T. Nuñez, K. Tiedtke, S. Toleikis, E. L. Saldin, E. A. Schneidmiller and M. V. Yurkov. We also thank R. Falcone, M. Ahmed and T. Allison for discussions, J. Alameda, E. Gullikson, F. Dollar, T. McCarville, F. Weber, J. Crawford, C. Stockton, W. Moberlychan, M. Haro, A. Minor, H. Thomas and E. Eremina for technical help with these experiments. The following agencies supported this work: the US Department of Energy (DOE) under contract to the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (the project was funded by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program at LLNL); The National Science Foundation Center for Biophotonics, University of California, Davis; The National Center for Electron Microscopy and the Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship to M.J.B.); Sven and Lilly Lawskis Foundation (doctoral fellowship to M.M.S.); the US Department of Energy Office of Science to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center; the European Union (TUIXS); The Swedish Research Council; The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education and The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research.
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H.N.C. and J.H. conceived the experiment and H.N.C., A.B., M.J.B., M.F., S.P.H.-R., S.M., B.W.W., S. Bajt, W.H.B., R.A.L., R.W.L., A.S., K.O.H., C.B., T.M. and J.H. contributed to its design. S. Bajt, E.S. and H.N.C. designed the multilayer optics. S.B. designed and fabricated the samples and S.B. and M.J.B. characterized them. E.P., M.K., R.T., S.D., T.T. and J.R.S. carried out interfacing and optimization of the experiment with FLASH. H.N.C., A.B., M.J.B., S.B., M.F., S.M., B.W.W., W.H.B., E.P., M.K., R.T., S.D., T.T., T.M., C.B., M.H., D.A.S., F.B., M.B., C.C., G.H., M.M.S. and J.H. carried out the experiment and H.N.C., A.B., M.J.B., S.B., S.P.H.-R., S.M., D.v.d.S., F.B., M.B., C.C., G.H., M.M.S., F.R.N.C.M., A.S., N.T. and J.H. carried out data analysis and interpretation. All authors discussed the results and contributed to the final manuscript.
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Chapman, H., Barty, A., Bogan, M. et al. Femtosecond diffractive imaging with a soft-X-ray free-electron laser. Nature Phys 2, 839–843 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys461
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys461
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