Editor's Summary
9 August 2007
Dusting off an old technique
Inspired by the 'dusty mirror' experiment that Isaac Newton used to demonstrate interference, Chapman et al. have devised a scheme to study microscopic particles with ultrafast and intense X-ray pulses. Newton's experiment involved visible light scattering from dust particles on the front of a back-quicksilvered mirror twice (once going into the mirror, once on its way out), and the corresponding circular interference patterns. In the modern version, X-ray pulses are focused on a thin membrane with polystyrene particles placed in front of an X-ray mirror. A pulse passes through the sample, triggering the explosion of a particle, and is then reflected back on to the sample by the mirror. The resulting diffraction pattern contains accurate time and spatially resolved information about the exploding particles. This type of X-ray 'flash' imaging may be used to explore the three-dimensional dynamics of materials at the timescale of atomic motion.
News and Views: Femtophysics: Double vision
By cunningly diffracting X-rays twice from an exploding nanometre-scale sphere, holographic images can be made of a tiny system evolving at lightning speed. The technique could be used to picture atomic dynamics.
Andrea Cavalleri
doi:10.1038/448651a
Letter: Femtosecond time-delay X-ray holography
Henry N. Chapman,
Stefan P. Hau-Riege,
Michael J. Bogan,
Sa
a Bajt,
Anton Barty,
Sébastien Boutet,
Stefano Marchesini,
Matthias Frank,
Bruce W. Woods,
W. Henry Benner,
Richard A. London,
Urs Rohner,
Abraham Szöke,
Eberhard Spiller,
Thomas Möller,
Christoph Bostedt,
David A. Shapiro,
Marion Kuhlmann,
Rolf Treusch,
Elke Plönjes,
Florian Burmeister,
Magnus Bergh,
Carl Caleman,
Gösta Huldt,
M. Marvin Seibert
&
Janos Hajdu
doi:10.1038/nature06049
