Structures of heterogeneous systems determined using XFEL pulses in the face of radiation damage

Intense, femtosecond x-ray free-electron laser pulses are a promising tool for studying the structure and dynamics of complex systems at atomic resolution.~ Our previous efforts, using an atomistic quantum/classical model to track the dynamical evolution of ions and electrons throughout a femtosecond x-ray pulse and out to picosecond timescales, focused on quantifying the effects of radiation damage on homogeneous rare gas clusters for imaging applications in an ideal situation.~ In these studies, the entire 3D Q-space scattering pattern was computed and available for reconstruction of the initial structure.~ However, a realistic representation of an experiment would feature a collection of noisy 2D scattering patterns, from which orientation would first be required to generate the 3D Q-space distribution from which solution of the phase problem and reconstruction would then proceed.~ We will present the first results of these efforts on heterogeneous systems.