Femtosecond Imaging of Single Particles and Molecules Using X-ray Free-Electron Lasers

X-ray free-electron lasers provide a greatly increased peak intensity on femtosecond time scales, opening up new opportunities to study the structure and dynamics of nanoparticles, viruses and biological macromolecules. These opportunities are being realized with new crystallography techniques to study nanoscale periodic samples and with coherent diffractive imaging techniques to study non-periodic samples. This chapter provides an introduction to coherent diffractive imaging techniques, a review of its applications and development at synchrotron sources, and finally a survey of the first imaging and crystallography results from X-ray laser experiments.