The availability of extremely bright sources of coherent X-rays such as the recently developed hard X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) at Stanford are creating entirely new fields of research across all major disciplines. Femtosecond nanocrystallography, for example, is rapidly maturing into a major new technique for structural biology, enabling high-resolution structural data to be collected from nanocrystals which are too small to measure using conventional X-ray sources. As increasing amounts of data become available however, the need to understand and conduct research into the effects of non-equilibrium electron dynamics and structural disorder is ever more apparent.
Here we present recent results of imaging and diffraction experiments carried out at both XFELs and third generation synchrotrons. Experimental data have been collected from both the Coherent X-ray Imaging (CXI) endstation at the LCLS-XFEL and beamline 34-ID-C at the Advanced Photon Source (APS). We find that the XFEL data contains evidence of both electronic and structural disorder whilst the synchrotron data provides a window into the elastic strain properties of protein crystals that can influence the structure retrieval1-3. Applying both crystallographic analysis and coherent imaging approaches to these data provide new insights into these effects, the results of which will be presented here. A more detailed understanding of how such phenomena influence the formation of crystallographic diffraction patterns will benefit both serial femtosecond nanocrystallography experiments as well as more conventional crystallography experiments at third generation synchrotron sources.
