Coherent diffractive imaging of single helium nanodroplets with a high   harmonic generation source
  Coherent diffractive imaging of individual free nanoparticles has opened novel routes for the in-situ analysis of their transient structural, optical, and electronic properties. So far, single-shot single-particle diffraction was assumed to be feasible only at extreme ultraviolet (XUV) and X-ray free-electron lasers, restricting this research field to large-scale facilities. Here we demonstrate single-shot imaging of isolated helium nanodroplets using XUV pulses from a femtosecond-laser driven high harmonic source. We obtain bright wide-angle scattering patterns, that allow us to uniquely identify hitherto unresolved prolate shapes of superfluid helium droplets. Our results mark the advent of single-shot gas-phase nanoscopy with lab-based short-wavelength pulses and pave the way to ultrafast coherent diffractive imaging with phase-controlled multicolor fields and attosecond pulses. 
Daniela Rupp, Nils Monserud, Bruno Langbehn, Mario Sauppe, Julian   Zimmermann, Yevheniy Ovcharenko, Thomas M\"oller, Fabio ...
physics.atm-clus physics.optics