- Schriber, Elyse A;
- Paley, Daniel W;
- Bolotovsky, Robert;
- Rosenberg, Daniel J;
- Sierra, Raymond G;
- Aquila, Andrew;
- Mendez, Derek;
- Poitevin, Frédéric;
- Blaschke, Johannes P;
- Bhowmick, Asmit;
- Kelly, Ryan P;
- Hunter, Mark;
- Hayes, Brandon;
- Popple, Derek C;
- Yeung, Matthew;
- Pareja-Rivera, Carina;
- Lisova, Stella;
- Tono, Kensuke;
- Sugahara, Michihiro;
- Owada, Shigeki;
- Kuykendall, Tevye;
- Yao, Kaiyuan;
- Schuck, P James;
- Solis-Ibarra, Diego;
- Sauter, Nicholas K;
- Brewster, Aaron S;
- Hohman, J Nathan
Inorganic-organic hybrid materials represent a large share of newly reported structures, owing to their simple synthetic routes and customizable properties1. 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 diffraction2,3 and electron microdiffraction4-11. 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 radiation12,13 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 approach14, the resulting datasets can be solved and refined using standard tools for single-crystal diffraction data15-17. 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 properties20. 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.