Fluorescence intensity correlation imaging with high resolution and elemental contrast using intense x-ray pulses

TL;DR

This paper explores using fluorescence intensity correlation with intense x-ray pulses to achieve high-resolution, elemental contrast imaging of nanomaterials, comparing it to coherent diffractive imaging and highlighting the benefits of femtosecond pulses.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework for FIC-based imaging with femtosecond XFEL pulses, demonstrating its potential for high-resolution and elemental contrast imaging, especially for dopant distribution.

Findings

FIC can provide high-resolution structural information with femtosecond pulses.

Few-femtosecond pulses are sufficient for high-resolution FIC imaging.

FIC can image dopant distributions in nanoparticles.

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the fluorescence intensity correlation (FIC) of Ar clusters and Mo-doped iron oxide nanoparticles subjected to intense, femtosecond and sub-femtosecond XFEL pulses for high-resolution and elemental contrast imaging. We present the FIC of {\Ka} and {\Kah} emission in Ar clusters and discuss the impact of sample damage on retrieving high-resolution structural information and compare the obtained structural information with those from the coherent difractive imaging (CDI) approach. We found that, while sub-femtosecond pulses will substantially benefit the CDI approach, few-femtosecond pulses may be sufficient for achieving high-resolution information with FIC. Furthermore, we show that the fluorescence intensity correlation computed from the fluorescence of Mo atoms in Mo-doped iron oxide nanoparticles can be used to image dopant distributions.