Applied Sciences (Oct 2021)

A Contrast Calibration Protocol for X-ray Speckle Visibility Spectroscopy

  • Yanwen Sun,
  • Vincent Esposito,
  • Philip Adam Hart,
  • Conny Hansson,
  • Haoyuan Li,
  • Kazutaka Nakahara,
  • James Paton MacArthur,
  • Silke Nelson,
  • Takahiro Sato,
  • Sanghoon Song,
  • Peihao Sun,
  • Paul Fuoss,
  • Mark Sutton,
  • Diling Zhu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/app112110041
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 11, no. 21
p. 10041

Abstract

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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.

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