Direct extraction of quantitative structural information from x-ray fluorescence holograms using spherical-harmonic analysis

An x-ray fluorescence holograph contains information on both the amplitude and the phase of the x-ray scattering signal from a crystal structure. X-ray fluorescence holography is potentially a technique to directly extract atomic level structure information from crystal samples. We present here a reconstruction algorithm using a spherical-harmonic analysis that significantly improves the structure-resolving power of x-ray fluorescence holography over the widely used multiple energy Barton transform approach. Compared to the direct method for x-ray diffraction, this direct method has the advantages of full model independence and applicability to crystal systems with a large contrast in atomic numbers.