Speaker
Joachim von Zanthier
(Uni Erlangen)
Description
For more than 100 years, X-rays have been used in crystallography to determine the structure of crystals and molecules via coherent diffraction methods. With the advent of accelerator-driven free-electron lasers (FEL) new avenues for high-resolution structure determination are explored that go even far beyond conventional X-ray crystallography [1-3]. Yet, these techniques rely on coherent scattering, i.e., incoherence due to fluorescence emission or wave front distortion is generally considered detrimental for these approaches. Here we show that using methods from quantum optics, i.e., exploiting spatial higher order photon correlation functions, 1D, 2D and even the full 3D arrangement of sources that scatter incoherent X-ray radiation can be resolved [4-8]. We discuss a number of properties of this incoherent diffraction imaging method that are conceptually superior to those of conventional coherent X-ray structure determination and point out that current FELs are ideally suited for the implementation of this approach [7]. We also present an experimental demonstration in the soft X-ray domain, where we use higher-order photon correlation functions to achieve higher fidelities in the image reconstruction and potentially sub-Abbe resolution [8].
Figure 1: Illustration of incoherent diffraction imaging: A large number of diffraction snapshots of incoherent X-rays scattered by a 3D source arrangement is recorded by a CCD; the photon correlations of each snapshot are determined individually; averaging over many snapshots leads to a pattern that yields the initial 3D distribution of the sources.
References
1. H. N. Chapman et al., Nature Phys. 2, 839 (2006).
2. H. N. Chapman et al., Nature 470, 73 (2011).
3. A. Barty, J. Küpper, H. N. Chapman, Annu. Rev. Phys. Chem. 64, 415 (2013) and references therein.
4. C. Thiel, T. Bastin, J. Martin, E. Solano, J. von Zanthier, G. S. Agarwal, Rev. Lett. 99, 133603 (2007).
5. S. Oppel, T. Büttner, P. Kok, J. von Zanthier, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 233603 (2012).
6. A. Classen, F. Waldmann, S. Giebel, R. Schneider, D Bhatti, T. Mehringer, J. von Zanthier, Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 253601 (2016).
7. A. Classen, K. Ayyer, H. N. Chapman, R. Röhlsberger, J. von Zanthier, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 053401 (2017).
8. R. Schneider et al., Nature Phys. 14, 126 (2018); see also News & Views, Nature Photon. 12, 6 (2018
Primary author
Joachim von Zanthier
(Uni Erlangen)
