  Coherent diffractive imaging of individual free nanoparticles has opened
novel routes for the in-situ analysis of their transient structural, optical,
and electronic properties. So far, single-shot single-particle diffraction was
assumed to be feasible only at extreme ultraviolet (XUV) and X-ray
free-electron lasers, restricting this research field to large-scale
facilities. Here we demonstrate single-shot imaging of isolated helium
nanodroplets using XUV pulses from a femtosecond-laser driven high harmonic
source. We obtain bright wide-angle scattering patterns, that allow us to
uniquely identify hitherto unresolved prolate shapes of superfluid helium
droplets. Our results mark the advent of single-shot gas-phase nanoscopy with
lab-based short-wavelength pulses and pave the way to ultrafast coherent
diffractive imaging with phase-controlled multicolor fields and attosecond
pulses.
