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Breakthrough in laser-alignment for macromolecular single-particle imaging

10 April 2025

Single-particle diffractive imaging (SPI) using X-ray free-electron lasers allows researchers to reconstruct the structure of nanoparticles and biomolecules. However, the technique often requires imaging up to several billion nanoparticles to produce the image and imposes limitations on its clarity and sharpness. Researchers at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science at DESY, together with international colleagues, recently demonstrated that laser-induced alignment can indeed be achieved to significantly improve molecular imaging techniques. This geometric confinement of the molecules in the x-ray-imaging experiment will greatly facilitate the recovery of the molecular orientation and, therefore, the structure retrieval. It thus overcomes a significant challenge in single-particle diffractive imaging. This novel development further paves the way for solving the three-dimensional structures of proteins and other macromolecules using SPI.

Timepix3: single-pixel multi-hit energy-measurement behaviour

13 November 2024

The event-driven hybrid-pixel detector readout chip, Timepix3, has the ability to simultaneously measure the time of an event on the nanosecond timescale and the energy deposited in the sensor. However, the behaviour of the system when two events are recorded in quick succession of each other on the same pixel was not studied in detail previously. We present experimental measurements, circuit simulations, and an empirical model for the impact of a preceding event on this energy measurements, which can result in a loss as high as 70%. Accounting for this effect enables more precise compensation, particularly for phenomena like timewalk. This results in significant improvements in time resolution — in the best case, multiple tens of nanoseconds — when two events happen in rapid succession.

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