Press releases
Please quote Nature Physics as the source of these items.
The November 2006 issue of Nature Physics is available online.
November 2006
X-ray image captured in record time
An X-ray image of micrometre-sized stick figures taken in a record time of just 25 femtoseconds is described by Henry Chapman and colleagues in the December issue of Nature Physics. The image, patterned into a metal film, was taken at around a trillion times faster than a conventional flash photograph — just moments before the film evaporated at a temperature of 60,000 degrees Celsius.
The image was collected using radiation produced by the FLASH 'free-electron laser' that began operation at the DESY facility in Germany earlier this year. This feat demonstrates an important proof-of-principle for a technique that should enable atomic-scale imaging of the structure of a much wider range of molecules than is possible using conventional synchrotron sources.
Free-electron lasers represent an exciting development in fields ranging from structural biology to nanotechnology. These lasers produce an intense and extremely short burst of X-rays enabling the structure of individual organic molecules to be collected, without the need to first form them into a crystal as is needed in conventional X-ray analysis. Although atomic-scale resolution is not demonstrated in the present work, this could soon be possible when the first of a new generation of more powerful free-electron sources, such as the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in the US, are complete.
Femtosecond diffractive imaging with a soft-X-ray free-electron laser pp 839 - 843
Henry N. Chapman, Anton Barty, Michael J. Bogan, Sébastien Boutet, Matthias Frank, Stefan P. Hau-Riege, Stefano Marchesini, Bruce W. Woods, Saa Bajt, W. Henry Benner, Richard A. London, Elke Plönjes, Marion Kuhlmann, Rolf Treusch, Stefan Düsterer, Thomas Tschentscher, Jochen R. Schneider, Eberhard Spiller, Thomas Möller, Christoph Bostedt, Matthias Hoener, David A. Shapiro, Keith O. Hodgson, David van der Spoel, Florian Burmeister, Magnus Bergh, Carl Caleman, Gösta Huldt, M. Marvin Seibert, Filipe R. N. C. Maia, Richard W. Lee, Abraham Szöke, Nicusor Timneanu and Janos Hajdu
Published online: 12 November 2006 | doi 10.1038/nphys461