The lensless Coherent Diffraction Imaging (CDI) technique has been developed significantly and is gaining time resolved potentials thanks to the advent of coherent and ultrashort pulses delivered by the X-ray free electron lasers (FEL). The shot-to-shot temporal and energy stability of the seeded-FEL pulses at Fermi@Elettra has opened extraordinary opportunities for CDI and in particular for Resonant Coherent Diffraction Imaging (R-CDI), overcoming some of the limitations imposed by the partial longitudinal coherence of the SASE-FELs.In addition, the multiple (linear and circular) polarization of Fermi-FEL pulses is an added value to explore specific contrast mechanisms, relevant to the spin and orbital sensitive electronic transitions.

The MiniTIMER compact split and delay line can be set up inside the DiProI chamber before the sample region to split each FEL pulse into to branches and recombine them on the sample with tunable incidence angle and delay (in collaboration with the EIS-TIMER beamline). This set up has been used for transient grating, coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering and time-resolved magnetic scattering experiments.
The typical crossing angle between the two beams is of about 6° and the delay can be scanned in the range of ±500 fs.