X-ray diffractive imaging of highly ionized helium nanodroplets

Helium nanodroplets as an efficient tool to investigate hydrogen attachment to alkali cations

“…25,26 Mutual repulsion of these He n + charge centers into minimum energy configurations distributes them uniformly close to the surface of HNDs. 27 This results in a mean charge state of the selected HNDs of z = 15. Charged droplets, consisting of 3 × 10 5 He atoms per charge were then mass-per-charge filtered by an electrostatic quadrupole bender.…”

“…25,26 Mutual repulsion of these He n + charge centers into minimum energy configurations distributes them uniformly close to the surface of HNDs. 27 This results in a mean charge state of the selected HNDs of z = 15.…”

The beam transport system for the Small Quantum Systems instrument at the European XFEL: optical layout and first commissioning results

“…The instrument, described in detail by Mazza et al (2012) and Meyer et al (2023), was commissioned in 2018 (Meyer et al, 2023) and the results of the first successful user experiments have been published (Kastirke et al, 2020a,b;Eichmann et al, 2020;Mazza et al, 2020;LaForge et al, 2021;Jahnke et al, 2021;Li et al, 2021Li et al, , 2022aBoll et al, 2022;Feinberg et al, 2022). Experiments at the SQS instrument exploit the intense, short and coherent X-ray pulses for nonlinear phenomena studies (Mazza et al, 2020;Eichmann et al, 2020;LaForge et al, 2021;Boll et al, 2022), for time-resolved experiments following dynamical processes on the femtosecond timescale (Kastirke et al, 2020b;Jahnke et al, 2021;Grychtol et al, 2021;Rivas et al, 2022) and for investigations using coherent scattering techniques (Ekeberg et al, 2022;Feinberg et al, 2022). This paper is dedicated to the description of the X-ray beam transport system in use during the commissioning phase and the first three user runs until the beginning of 2020, and reports on its performance, evaluated from the results obtained during its commissioning.…”

Three-dimensional femtosecond snapshots of isolated faceted nanostructures

“…Thus, it is capable of fully exploiting the high-intensity ultrashort light pulses provided by the recently available free-electron lasers (FELs) to image isolated nanosamples. Examples range from biologically relevant specimen such as single viruses (4,6) or macromolecules (7) to atomic clusters (8)(9)(10), nanocrystals (11), and even such fragile and short-lived structures as aerosols (12) or superfluid helium nanodroplets (13,14). The extremely short pulses further allow time-resolved imaging of ultrafast dynamics in isolated nanoscale structures, which has opened up unprecedented possibilities for light-matter interaction studies (15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24).…”