Incoherent diffraction imaging and its application for XFEL pulse characterization

by Fabian Trost (CFEL)

Monday 26 Jun 2023, 15:00 → 16:00 Europe/Berlin

XHQ / E1.173 (European XFEL)

X-ray fluorescence emission, which cannot maintain a stationary interference pattern, can be used to obtain images of structures by recording photon-photon correlations in the manner of the stellar intensity interferometry of Hanbury Brown and Twiss. This can be achieved utilizing femtosecond-duration pulses of a hard x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) to generate the emission in exposures comparable to the coherence time of the fluorescence. We recently demonstrated this method, called “incoherent diffraction imaging (IDI),” on a simple yet non-trivial emitter distribution. Besides possible further imaging applications, IDI can be used to image the focus of the XFEL spatially, and due to the dependence of the signal’s visibility on the XFEL pulse duration also temporally.