Fig. 3.

Three characteristic types of diffraction images from helium nanodroplets. The majority of images contains concentric ring patterns a, b that are assigned to spherical droplets. Elliptical ring structures as in c or pronounced streak patterns as in d-f reflect deformed helium droplets. The measured dataset comprises 1762 ring-type, 421 elliptical, and 68 streak-type images. In most cases, the latter exhibit a clear bending of the streaks (55 out of 68 images), e.g., as in d and f. For details, see Supplementary Note 3. False color images, color bar applies to all patterns, intensity in arbitrary units