Femtosecond X-ray Fourier holography imaging of free-flying nanoparticles
Journal article, 2018

Ultrafast X-ray imaging on individual fragile specimens such as aerosols 1 , metastable particles 2 , superfluid quantum systems 3 and live biospecimens 4 provides high-resolution information that 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 4,5 . Here, we introduce the method of in-flight holography, where we use nanoclusters as reference X-ray scatterers 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 lateral 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 timescale.
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Published in

Nature Photonics

1749-4885 (ISSN) 17494893 (eISSN)

Vol. 12 Issue 3 p. 150-153

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Subject Categories (SSIF 2011)

Astronomy, Astrophysics and Cosmology

Atom and Molecular Physics and Optics

Other Physics Topics

Identifiers

DOI

10.1038/s41566-018-0110-y

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Latest update

4/10/2019