An international team of researchers including scientists from FAU has, for the first time, used X-rays for an imaging technique that exploits a particular quantum characteristic of light. In their article, which has now been published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers detail how this process could be used for imaging non-crystallized macromolecules.
This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: (a) Simplified sketch of the experimental setup. (b) Simulated intensity distribution in the focal plane with the phase grating. (c) Photon counts at the AGIPD, measured with the phase grating, averaged over 58 million patterns. This is a flat distribution without any apparent structural information. The mean photon count per pixel per frame was ⟨I⟩=0.0077. Credit: Physical Review Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.173201 The research team used the extremely short and very intensive X-ray pulses at the X-ray laser European EXFEL in Hamburg in order to generate fluorescence photons that arrived almost simultaneously at the detector—in a time window of less than one femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second). By calculating the photon-photon correlations in the fluorescence of the illuminated copper atoms, it was possible to create an image of the light source. On the atomic scale, the structures of materials and macromolecules are usually determined using X-ray crystallography. While this technique relies on coherent X-ray diffraction, the scattering of X-ray light can cause…