Single-shot 3D structure determination of nanocrystals with femtosecond X-ray free electron laser pulses

Abstract

Coherent diffraction imaging (CDI) using synchrotron radiation, X-ray free electron lasers (X-FELs), high harmonic generation, soft X-ray lasers, and optical lasers has found broad applications across several disciplines. An active research direction in CDI is to determine the structure of single particles with intense, femtosecond X-FEL pulses based on diffraction-before-destruction scheme. However, single-shot 3D structure determination has not been experimentally realized yet. Here we report the first experimental demonstration of single-shot 3D structure determination of individual nanocrystals using ~10 femtosecond X-FEL pulses. Coherent diffraction patterns are collected from high-index-faceted nanocrystals, each struck by a single X-FEL pulse. Taking advantage of the symmetry of the nanocrystal, we reconstruct the 3D structure of each nanocrystal from a single-shot diffraction pattern at ~5.5 nm resolution. As symmetry exists in many nanocrystals and virus particles, this method can be applied to 3D structure studies of such particles at nanometer resolution on femtosecond time scales.

18 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Femtosecond Diffractive Imaging with a Soft-X-ray Free-Electron Laser
• High-resolution ab initio three-dimensional X-ray diffraction microscopy
• Sparsity-based single-shot sub-wavelength coherent diffractive imaging
• Quantitative Imaging of Single, Unstained Viruses with Coherent X-rays
• Oversampling smoothness (OSS): an effective algorithm for phase retrieval of noisy diffraction intensities
• Three-dimensional structure determination from a single view
• Cryptotomography: reconstructing 3D Fourier intensities from randomly oriented single-shot diffraction patterns

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• The Scatman: an approximate method for fast wide-angle scattering simulations
• Linear Theory Analysis of Self-Amplified Parametric X-ray Radiation from High Current Density Electron Bunches
• Tabletop Nanometer Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging in an Extended Reflection Mode using Coherent Fresnel Ptychography