University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

We describe a method for reconstructing the time-resolved difference electron density in a pump-probe experiment by analyzing x-ray intensities scattered from an ensemble of identical biomolecules. The method relies on measuring the angular correlations of intensities, averaged over a large number of diffractions patterns from randomly oriented particles. The differences between intensity correlations from the dark and photoexcited structures enable the direct calculation of the difference electron density with a prior knowledge of the dark structure only. We consider the limitations imposed by Poisson noise and on the number of particles per diffraction snapshot on the application of the proposed algorithm for structure recovery.