Electronic Damage Suppression in X-ray Diffraction with Attosecond X-ray Pulses

So far, the focus of state-of-the-art structure determination using x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) pulses has been on macromolecular crystallography. This approach has achieved remarkable success in solving the structure of microcrystals smaller than a few micrometres, which are difficult to investigate using conventional synchrotron sources. However, successful applications of XFELs to inorganic and small-molecule crystallography have been limited due to rapid electron excitation in these samples. This same issue has also prevented the use of XFELs in charge-density studies of solids. In this study, we propose using hard x-ray pulses with an attosecond duration for x-ray imaging of charge density in organic and inorganic systems. Simulations of irradiated diamond and silicon showed that attosecond x-ray pulses consistently reduce the electronic excitation for a fixed photon energy and pulse fluence. Further reduction of transient electronic damage can be achieved by increasing the x-ray photon energy under these conditions. These theoretical predictions demonstrate a powerful and well-founded strategy for visualizing valence-electron distribution, opening up new prospects for diffraction imaging studies with XFELs.