Title: 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.