Coherent diffractive imaging of single helium nanodroplets with a high harmonic generation source

Abstract

Coherent diffractive imaging of individual free nanoparticles has opened novel routes for the in-situ analysis of their transient structural, optical, and electronic properties. So far, single-shot single-particle diffraction was assumed to be feasible only at extreme ultraviolet (XUV) and X-ray free-electron lasers, restricting this research field to large-scale facilities. Here we demonstrate single-shot imaging of isolated helium nanodroplets using XUV pulses from a femtosecond-laser driven high harmonic source. We obtain bright wide-angle scattering patterns, that allow us to uniquely identify hitherto unresolved prolate shapes of superfluid helium droplets. Our results mark the advent of single-shot gas-phase nanoscopy with lab-based short-wavelength pulses and pave the way to ultrafast coherent diffractive imaging with phase-controlled multicolor fields and attosecond pulses.

References in corpus (4)

• Three-dimensional structure determination from a single view
• Coherent Electron Scattering Captured by an Attosecond Quantum Stroboscope
• Single-shot 3D structure determination of nanocrystals with femtosecond X-ray free electron laser pulses
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