1. |
- Aleksich, Mariya, et al.
(author)
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XFEL Microcrystallography of Self-Assembling Silver n-Alkanethiolates
- 2023
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In: Journal of the American Chemical Society. - 0002-7863. ; 145:31, s. 17042-17055
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- New synthetic hybrid materials and their increasing complexity have placed growing demands on crystal growth for single-crystal X-ray diffraction analysis. Unfortunately, not all chemical systems are conducive to the isolation of single crystals for traditional characterization. Here, small-molecule serial femtosecond crystallography (smSFX) at atomic resolution (0.833 Å) is employed to characterize microcrystalline silver n-alkanethiolates with various alkyl chain lengths at X-ray free electron laser facilities, resolving long-standing controversies regarding the atomic connectivity and odd-even effects of layer stacking. smSFX provides high-quality crystal structures directly from the powder of the true unknowns, a capability that is particularly useful for systems having notoriously small or defective crystals. We present crystal structures of silver n-butanethiolate (C4), silver n-hexanethiolate (C6), and silver n-nonanethiolate (C9). We show that an odd-even effect originates from the orientation of the terminal methyl group and its role in packing efficiency. We also propose a secondary odd-even effect involving multiple mosaic blocks in the crystals containing even-numbered chains, identified by selected-area electron diffraction measurements. We conclude with a discussion of the merits of the synthetic preparation for the preparation of microdiffraction specimens and compare the long-range order in these crystals to that of self-assembled monolayers.
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2. |
- Villanueva Perez, Pablo, et al.
(author)
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Megahertz X-ray Multi-projection imaging
- 2023
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In: arXiv.org. - 2331-8422.
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)abstract
- X-ray time-resolved tomography is one of the most popular X-raytechniques to probe dynamics in three dimensions (3D). Recent developments in time-resolved tomography opened the possibility of recordingkilohertz-rate 3D movies. However, tomography requires rotating thesample with respect to the X-ray beam, which prevents characterization of faster structural dynamics. Here, we present megahertz (MHz)X-ray multi-projection imaging (MHz-XMPI), a technique capable ofrecording volumetric information at MHz rates and micrometer resolution without scanning the sample. We achieved this by harnessing theunique megahertz pulse structure and intensity of the European X-rayFree-electron Laser with a combination of novel detection and reconstruction approaches that do not require sample rotations. Our approachenables generating multiple X-ray probes that simultaneously record several angular projections for each pulse in the megahertz pulse burst.We provide a proof-of-concept demonstration of the MHz-XMPI technique’s capability to probe 4D (3D+time) information on stochasticphenomena and non-reproducible processes three orders of magnitudefaster than state-of-the-art time-resolved X-ray tomography, by generating 3D movies of binary droplet collisions. We anticipate that MHz-XMPIwill enable in-situ and operando studies that were impossible before,either due to the lack of temporal resolution or because the systemswere opaque (such as for MHz imaging based on optical microscopy).
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