title: Serial snapshot crystallography for materials science with SwissFEL.
abstract: New opportunities for studying (sub)microcrystalline materials with small unit cells, both organic and inorganic, will open up when the X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) presently being constructed in Switzerland (SwissFEL) comes online in 2017. Our synchrotron-based experiments mimicking the 4%-energy-bandpass mode of the SwissFEL beam show that it will be possible to record a diffraction pattern of up to 10 randomly oriented crystals in a single snapshot, to index the resulting reflections, and to extract their intensities reliably. The crystals are destroyed with each XFEL pulse, but by combining snapshots from several sets of crystals, a complete set of data can be assembled, and crystal structures of materials that are difficult to analyze otherwise will become accessible. Even with a single shot, at least a partial analysis of the crystal structure will be possible, and with 10-50 femtosecond pulses, this offers tantalizing possibilities for time-resolved studies.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Crystallography, ETH Zurich , Vladimir-Prelog-Weg 5, Zurich, 8093, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Dejoie
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Crystallography, ETH Zurich , Vladimir-Prelog-Weg 5, Zurich, 8093, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Stef
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Smeets
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Crystallography, ETH Zurich , Vladimir-Prelog-Weg 5, Zurich, 8093, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Baerlocher
authors.affiliation: Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
authors.forename: Nobumichi
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Tamura
authors.affiliation: Swiss-Norwegian Beamlines, European Synchrotron Radiation Facility , 71 avenue des Martyrs, Grenoble, 38042, France ; Laboratory of Crystallography, EPFL , Rte de la Sorge, Lausanne, 1015, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Philip
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Pattison
authors.affiliation: SwissFEL, Paul Scherrer Institut , Villigen PSI, 5232, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Rafael
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Abela
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Crystallography, ETH Zurich , Vladimir-Prelog-Weg 5, Zurich, 8093, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Lynne B
authors.initials: LB
authors.lastname: McCusker
keywords: XFEL; broad-bandpass beam; indexing; multi-microcrystal diffraction; serial snapshot crystallography