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X-ray imaging

Ultrafast diffract-and-destroy movies

Nature Photonics volume 2, pages 390–391 (2008)Cite this article

Combining optical and X-ray lasers enables imaging with high temporal and spectral resolution. By taking pictures of a succession of exploding targets, a movie can be made charting the dynamics of the solid material on a 10-ps timescale.

Science often advances in bursts. These can be due to new sources or detectors or the introduction of new paradigms from theoretical research. We may be living through one such burst at present: the recent pace of X-ray laser development is quite remarkable. Leading the way is Germany's 'FLASH' facility at DESY, which now boasts the ability to generate 8-fs pulses of 7-nm-wavelength radiation (soon to be 3 nm), each containing about 1012 photons. To put this in perspective, the time taken for a single period of atomic nuclear vibration is about 100 fs, whereas the finest detail visible in an image is normally larger than the wavelength used for the imaging. So can we expect to make movies of atomic motion during chemical reactions? Unfortunately nuclei, unlike electrons, don't diffract ordinary X-rays. 'Seeing atoms' directly requires the shorter wavelengths of hard X-rays; however, these intense pulses vaporize any sample, and X-ray lenses with atomic resolution are hard to find. So there are problems. Nevertheless, on page 415 of this issue, Anton Barty et al. present an experimental X-ray movie of an exploding object with just 10 picoseconds between each frame and a shutter speed of 10 fs at a spatial resolution better than 50 nm using 13.5-nm X-rays1.

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Figure 1: Each frame of a diffract-and-destroy movie comes from different but identical objects, with a different delay (here a 10-ps difference) between the onset of the explosion and the instant the scattering pattern is obtained.

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  1. John Spence is in the Department of Physics, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287-1504, USA. jspence@asu.edu,

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Spence, J. Ultrafast diffract-and-destroy movies. Nature Photon 2, 390–391 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2008.115

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