Chemical crystallography by serial femtosecond X-ray diffraction
Elyse A. Schriber⧓, Daniel W. Paley⧓, Robert Bolotovsky, Daniel J. Rosenberg, Raymond G. Sierra, Andrew Aquila, Derek Mendez, Frédéric Poitevin, Johannes Blaschke, Asmit Bhowmick, Ryan P. Kelly, Mark S. Hunter, Brandon Hayes, Derek Popple, Matthew Yeung, Carina Pareja‐Rivera, Stella Lisova, Kensuke Tono, Michihiro Sugahara, Shigeki Owada, Tevye Kuykendall, Kaiyuan Yao, P. James Schuck, Diego Solís-Ibarra, Nicholas K. Sauter, Aaron S. Brewster, J. Nathan Hohman
Abstract
Abstract Inorganic–organic hybrid materials represent a large share of newly reported structures, owing to their simple synthetic routes and customizable properties 1 . This proliferation has led to a characterization bottleneck: many hybrid materials are obligate microcrystals with low symmetry and severe radiation sensitivity, interfering with the standard techniques of single-crystal X-ray diffraction 2,3 and electron microdiffraction 4–11 . Here we demonstrate small-molecule serial femtosecond X-ray crystallography (smSFX) for the determination of material crystal structures from microcrystals. We subjected microcrystalline suspensions to X-ray free-electron laser radiation 12,13 and obtained thousands of randomly oriented diffraction patterns. We determined unit cells by aggregating spot-finding results into high-resolution powder diffractograms. After indexing the sparse serial patterns by a graph theory approach 14 , the resulting datasets can be solved and refined using standard tools for single-crystal diffraction data 15–17 . We describe the ab initio structure solutions of mithrene (AgSePh) 18–20 , thiorene (AgSPh) and tethrene (AgTePh), of which the latter two were previously unknown structures. In thiorene, we identify a geometric change in the silver–silver bonding network that is linked to its divergent optoelectronic properties 20 . We demonstrate that smSFX can be applied as a general technique for structure determination of beam-sensitive microcrystalline materials at near-ambient temperature and pressure.