More coherent x-ray lens-less image reconstructions

New paper in Science by Pierre Thibault et al. “High-Resolution Scanning X-ray Diffraction Microscopy” Science 321, 379 (2008).

Authors use an approach identical to ptychography  to demonstrate the power of the technique by reconstructing the Fresnel Zone Plate – similar to work by Rodenburg et al., PRL 98, 034801 (2007).

John Miao and his UCLA group has used lensless imaging to reconstruct image of a single virus:

C. Song et al., “Quantitative Imaging of Single, Unstained Viruses with Coherent X-rays” arXiv:0806.2875.

And Stadler et al. “Hard X Ray Holographic Diffraction Imaging” Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 245503 (2008) show that the x-ray holographic approach similar to the one previously used by Eisebitt et al., Nature 432, 885 (2004) works in hard-xray regime as should be expected. They cleverly used five carefully positioned nanoparticles as the negative sources of reference beam, and successfully demonstrated that letter “P” can be reconstructed, adding to an impressive alphabet of reconstructed letters and logos. While use of hard x-rays paves the road for imaging of thick speciments, it’s not clear if one could take advantage of the same principle in high-angle diffraction geometry, which is where real action is for hard x-rays.