Letter abstract
Nature Physics 2, 839 - 843 (2006)
doi:10.1038/nphys461
Subject Categories: Optical physics | Techniques and instrumentation
Femtosecond diffractive imaging with a soft-X-ray free-electron laser
Henry N. Chapman1,2,
Anton Barty1,
Michael J. Bogan1,
Sébastien Boutet1,3,4,
Matthias Frank1,
Stefan P. Hau-Riege1,
Stefano Marchesini1,2,
Bruce W. Woods1,
Sa
a Bajt1,
W. Henry Benner1,
Richard A. London1,2,
Elke Plönjes5,
Marion Kuhlmann5,
Rolf Treusch5,
Stefan Düsterer5,
Thomas Tschentscher5,
Jochen R. Schneider5,
Eberhard Spiller6,
Thomas Möller7,
Christoph Bostedt7,
Matthias Hoener7,
David A. Shapiro2,
Keith O. Hodgson3,
David van der Spoel4,
Florian Burmeister4,
Magnus Bergh4,
Carl Caleman4,
Gösta Huldt4,
M. Marvin Seibert4,
Filipe R. N. C. Maia4,
Richard W. Lee1,4,
Abraham Szöke1,4,
Nicusor Timneanu4
and
Janos Hajdu3,4
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.
- University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Avenue, Livermore, California 94550, USA
- Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology, University of California, Davis, 2700 Stockton Blvd, Suite 1400, Sacramento, California 95817, USA
- Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, California 94305, USA
- Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics, Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Uppsala University, Husargatan 3, Box 596, SE-75124 Uppsala, Sweden
-
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, DESY, Notkestra
e 85, D-22607 Hamburg, Germany
- Spiller X-ray Optics, Livermore, California 94550, USA
-
Institut für Optik und Atomare Physik, Technische Universität Berlin, Hardenbergstrae 36, PN 3-1, 10623 Berlin, Germany
Correspondence to: Henry N. Chapman1,2 e-mail: henry.chapman@llnl.gov
Correspondence to: Janos Hajdu3,4 e-mail: janos.hajdu@xray.bmc.uu.se
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