Megahertz single-particle imaging at the European XFEL

E V Sobolev ,Sergey Bobkov,Kerstin Mühlig,Jochen Küpper,Chan Kim,Stephan Stern,John C H Spence,Katerina Dörner,Leonie Flückiger,Kartik Ayyer,Richard Bean,Changyong Song,M Franklin Rose ,Jonas A Sellberg,Ivan A Vartanyants,Adrian P Mancuso ,Anton Teslyuk ,Chen Xu,P Lourdu Xavier,Garth J Williams,Benedikt J Daurer,Takushi Sato,A Ourmazd ,Henry N Chapman,Romain Letrun,Britta Weinhausen,Johan Bielecki,N Duane Loh,Hemanth K N Reddy,Sadia Bari,Marc Messerschmidt,Andrei Rode ,A Silenzi ,Charlotte Uetrecht,Marcin Sikorski,Peter Schwander,Luca Gelisio,Tomas Ekeberg,V A Ilyin ,Brenda G Hogue,Henry Kirkwood,Olena Kulyk,Jakob Andreasson,Yoonhee Kim,Anton Barty,Adam Round,J Sztuk-Dambietz ,Richard A Kirian,Chul-Ho Jung ,Imrich Barák ,Kenta Okamoto,Klaus Giewekemeyer,Kristina Lorenzen,Martin Trebbin,Victor S Lamzin,Ahmad Hosseinizadeh,Grzegorz Chojnowski,Nicuşor Tı̂mneanu ,Oxana V Galzitskaya ,Natascha Raab,S I Zolotarev ,Daniel A Horke,Robin Schubert,Steffen Hauf,Filipe R N C Maia

doi:10.1038/s42005-020-0362-y

Abstract

The emergence of high repetition-rate X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) powered by superconducting accelerator technology enables the measurement of significantly more experimental data per day than was previously possible. The European XFEL is expected to provide 27,000 pulses per second, over two orders of magnitude more than any other XFEL. The increased pulse rate is a key enabling factor for single-particle X-ray diffractive imaging, which relies on averaging the weak diffraction signal from single biological particles. Taking full advantage of this new capability requires that all experimental steps, from sample preparation and delivery to the acquisition of diffraction patterns, are compatible with the increased pulse repetition rate. Here, we show that single-particle imaging can be performed using X-ray pulses at megahertz repetition rates. The results obtained pave the way towards exploiting high repetition-rate X-ray free-electron lasers for single-particle imaging at their full repetition rate.

Highlights

Background characterizationThe background scattering data were collected in the third shift, comprising 4000 images taken with an average pulse energy of 1.135 mJ, as measured by the Xray gas monitor detector[23], and 120,000 images with an average pulse energy of 1.477 mJ in the fourth shift.In addition to the instrument background, we measured the background including any contributions from the gas used for sample delivery itself, known as injection background, by using the frames classified as nonhits, as described above
11,255,800 frames were recorded with the MHz camera Adaptive Gain Integrated Pixel Detector (AGIPD), out of which 557,675 patterns were identified as hits or diffraction patterns from the target samples
The high repetition rate of the EuXFEL allows the collection of very large datasets that can be used to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by averaging information from many diffraction patterns

Summary

Introduction

The background scattering data were collected in the third shift, comprising 4000 images taken with an average pulse energy of 1.135 mJ, as measured by the Xray gas monitor detector[23], and 120,000 images with an average pulse energy of 1.477 mJ in the fourth shift. In addition to the instrument background, we measured the background including any contributions from the gas used for sample delivery itself, known as injection background, by using the frames classified as nonhits, as described above. We calculated the average injection background for each shift, except for the third shift when the detector was moved. (with θ half the scattering angle) in Fig. 3a, b, was averaged over. The injection background barely exceeds the instrument background at low diffraction angles

Methods

Results

Conclusion