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

• DOI: 10.1038/s41566-018-0110-y
• Publication Date: 2018-02-16T09:29:13Z
• Authors: Tais Gorkhover; Anatoli Ulmer; Ken Ferguson; Max Bucher; Filipe R. N. C. Maia; Johan Bielecki; Tomas Ekeberg; Max F. Hantke; Benedikt J. Daurer; Carl Nettelblad; Jakob Andreasson; Anton Barty; Petr Bruza; Sebastian Carron; Dirk Hasse; Jacek Krzywinski; Daniel S. D. Larsson; Andrew Morgan; Kerstin Mühlig; Maria Müller; Kenta Okamoto; Alberto Pietrini; Daniela Rupp; Mario Sauppe; Gijs van der Schot; Marvin Seibert; Jonas A. Sellberg; Martin Svenda; Michelle Swiggers; Nicusor Timneanu; Daniel Westphal; Garth Williams; Alessandro Zani; Henry N. Chapman; Gyula Faigel; Thomas Möller; Janos Hajdu; Christoph Bostedt
• Keywords: FOS: Physical sciences; Physics - Atomic and Molecular Clusters; info:eu-repo/classification/ddc/530; Atomic and Molecular Clusters (physics.atm-clus); 530; Physics - Optics; Optics (physics.optics); 3. Good health

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.