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- Barty, Anton, et al.
(författare)
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Ultrafast single-shot diffraction imaging of nanoscale dynamics
- 2008
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Ingår i: Nature Photonics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1749-4885 .- 1749-4893. ; 2:7, s. 415-419
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The transient nanoscale dynamics of materials on femtosecond to picosecond timescales is of great interest in the study of condensed phase dynamics such as crack formation, phase separation and nucleation, and rapid fluctuations in the liquid state or in biologically relevant environments. The ability to take images in a single shot is the key to studying non-repetitive behaviour mechanisms, a capability that is of great importance in many of these problems. Using coherent diffraction imaging with femtosecond X-ray free-electron-laser pulses we capture time-series snapshots of a solid as it evolves on the ultrafast timescale. Artificial structures imprinted on a Si3N4 window are excited with an optical laser and undergo laser ablation, which is imaged with a spatial resolution of 50 nm and a temporal resolution of 10 ps. By using the shortest available free-electron-laser wavelengths(1) and proven synchronization methods(2) this technique could be extended to spatial resolutions of a few nanometres and temporal resolutions of a few tens of femtoseconds. This experiment opens the door to a new regime of time-resolved experiments in mesoscopic dynamics.
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2. |
- Chapman, Henry N., et al.
(författare)
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Femtosecond diffractive imaging with a soft-X-ray free-electron laser
- 2006
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Ingår i: Nature Physics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1745-2473 .- 1745-2481. ; 2:12, s. 839-843
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Theory predicts(1-4) 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 x 10(13) W cm(-2) pulse, containing 10(12) 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 oversampling(5-9), 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 one(10).
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