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Title: A Contrast Calibration Protocol for X-ray Speckle Visibility Spectroscopy

Journal Article · · Applied Sciences
DOI:https://doi.org/10.3390/app112110041· OSTI ID:1828101

X-ray free electron lasers, with their ultrashort highly coherent pulses, opened up the opportunity of probing ultrafast nano- and atomic-scale dynamics in amorphous and disordered material systems via speckle visibility spectroscopy. However, the anticipated count rate in a typical experiment is usually low. Therefore, visibility needs to be extracted via photon statistics analysis, i.e., by estimating the probabilities of multiple photons per pixel events using pixelated detectors. Considering the realistic X-ray detector responses including charge cloud sharing between pixels, pixel readout noise, and gain non-uniformity, speckle visibility extraction relying on photon assignment algorithms are often computationally demanding and suffer from systematic errors. In this paper, we present a systematic study of the commonly-used algorithms by applying them to an experimental data set containing small-angle coherent scattering with visibility levels ranging from below 1% to ∼60%. We also propose a contrast calibration protocol and show that a computationally lightweight algorithm can be implemented for high-speed correlation evaluation.

Research Organization:
SLAC National Accelerator Lab., Menlo Park, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-76SF00515
OSTI ID:
1828101
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1829297
Journal Information:
Applied Sciences, Journal Name: Applied Sciences Vol. 11 Journal Issue: 21; ISSN 2076-3417
Publisher:
MDPI AGCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
Switzerland
Language:
English

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