Abstract:
The dream of imaging single molecules was instrumental to the construction of X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs). The extremely bright and short pulses provided by XFELs make it possible to collect the diffraction pattern of a particle before its destruction (Neutze et al. 2000) which was successfully proved at FLASH more than a decade ago (Chapman et al. 2006). Since then, the method of flash X-ray imaging (FXI) has been used to image live cells (van der Schot et al. 2015), cell organelles (Hantke et al. 2014) and in particular the giant Mimivirus in both two dimensions (Seibert et al. 2011) and three dimensions (Ekeberg et al. 2015). The inauguration of the European XFEL marked the beginning of the high-intensity, high-repetition-rate and high data-rate era of XFELs, and it has been shown that FXI can take full advantage of those rates (Sobolev et al. 2020).

Yet, FXI has not yet fulfilled its promise of high-resolution sub-nanometer imaging. In this talk I will present our latest results from single-particle imaging experiments at the SQS beamline at the European XFEL. I will also discuss the future of single-particle imaging, how we are tantalizingly close to our goals and how several new technologies can help us get there.

Bio:
Filipe Maia is professor of molecular biophysics at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at Uppsala University, Sweden. A native of Portugal, he graduated in biochemistry in 2004 from the University of Porto, and in 2010 completed his PhD in physics, specializing in molecular biophysics, at Uppsala University, Sweden. He then joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a Petascale Postdoctoral Fellow, where he founded the Coherent X-ray Imaging Database. In 2012 he returned to Sweden to build his own group focusing on X-ray ultrafast single-particle diffraction imaging. He has been involved in coherent diffractive imaging experiments at XFELs since their beginning and currently leads the single-particle initiative at the European XFEL.

The CoWork webinar series is dedicated to the exploitation of the coherence properties of X-rays for advanced materials characterization, with a special focus on inverse microscopy techniques, such as Coherent Diffraction Imaging (CDI), Ptychography and Holography. It is an introduction to Coherent X-ray imaging methods to facilitate the access to advanced microscopy techniques to new users and it welcomes all researchers intrigued by the spectacular coherence properties of X-rays produced at modern synchrotron sources – of which MAX IV is a first example.