Coherent X-ray beams

I am on holiday, these entries were generated in advance. I cannot respond to e-mail whilst abroad.

Recently, more and more people have started talking about results from scattering and diffraction experiments from coherent X-ray sources. Wondering what all the commotion was about, I found this article. It offers, amongst a bit of theory, some nice insights.

I understood, for as far as I read it, that for very small “packets” of X-ray light, all X-Ray waves are in phase. Upon detection, one can then detect the scattering amplitude, instead of “merely” the scattering intensity. Thus, phase information is preserved in that information.

With this information, in combination with reasonably fast detectors, one can obtain “speckle dynamics” information, that can be directly correlated to the real-time fluctuation s in dynamic processes in a sample.

As I understand, this information is comparable to dynamic light scattering experiments, albeit on a different scale. Thus I think, for my experiments this technique holds little merit over non-coherent experiments. It feels good, though, to finally understand what the talk is about.