Visualizing aerosol-particle injection for diffractive-imaging experiments

Abstract

Delivering sub-micrometer particles to an intense x-ray focus is a crucial aspect of single-particle diffractive-imaging experiments at x-ray free-electron lasers. Enabling direct visualization of sub-micrometer aerosol particle streams without interfering with the operation of the particle injector can greatly improve the overall efficiency of single-particle imaging experiments by reducing the amount of time and sample consumed during measurements. We have developed in-situ non-destructive imaging diagnostics to aid real-time particle injector optimization and x-ray/particle-beam alignment, based on laser illumination schemes and fast imaging detectors. Our diagnostics are constructed to provide a non-invasive rapid feedback on injector performance during measurements, and have been demonstrated during diffraction measurements at the FLASH free-electron laser.

15 pages

References in corpus (1)

• Gas Dynamic Virtual Nozzle for Generation of Microscopic Droplet Streams

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Optimizing aerodynamic lenses for single-particle imaging
• Femtosecond x-ray diffraction from an aerosolized beam of protein nanocrystals
• Light-sheet imaging for the recording of transverse absolute density distributions of gas-phase particle-beams from nanoparticle injectors
• An improved numerical simulation methodology for nanoparticle injection through aerodynamic lens systems