Femtosecond X-ray Fourier holography imaging of free-flying nanoparticles

Abstract

Ultrafast X-ray imaging provides high resolution information on individual fragile specimens such as aerosols, metastable particles, superfluid quantum systems and live biospecimen, which is inaccessible with conventional imaging techniques. Coherent X-ray diffractive imaging, however, suffers from intrinsic loss of phase, and therefore structure recovery is often complicated and not always uniquely-defined. Here, we introduce the method of in-flight holography, where we use nanoclusters as reference X-ray scatterers in order to encode relative phase information into diffraction patterns of a virus. The resulting hologram contains an unambiguous three-dimensional map of a virus and two nanoclusters with the highest lat- eral resolution so far achieved via single shot X-ray holography. Our approach unlocks the benefits of holography for ultrafast X-ray imaging of nanoscale, non-periodic systems and paves the way to direct observation of complex electron dynamics down to the attosecond time scale.

References in corpus (5)

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• Ultrafast, ultrabright, X-ray holography using a uniformly-redundant array
• Coherent diffractive imaging of single helium nanodroplets with a high harmonic generation source
• Use of extended and prepared reference objects in experimental Fourier transform X-ray holography
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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Holographic Phase Retrieval and Reference Design
• Mineral Detection of Neutrinos and Dark Matter. A Whitepaper
• Towards Low-Photon Nanoscale Imaging: Holographic Phase Retrieval via Maximum Likelihood Optimization
• Three-Dimensional Coherent Diffractive Imaging of Isolated Faceted Nanostructures
• Reference-enhanced X-ray Single Particle Imaging
• Phase Retrieval with Holography and Untrained Priors: Tackling the Challenges of Low-Photon Nanoscale Imaging
• Fast reconstruction of single-shot wide-angle diffraction images through deep learning
• Quantum coherent diffractive imaging
• Hybrid real- and reciprocal-space full-field imaging with coherent illumination
• Single-shot imaging with randomized structured illumination at a free electron laser