Coherent Diffractive Imaging Using Curved-Beam Illumination

The potential of coherent diffractive imaging has in recent years become well recognized. In this technique an essentially parallel beam of coherent x-rays illuminates a support region containing an unknown sample. Outside that region the wavefield is known--typically the sample is isolated so that outside the support there is no scattering. When the diffraction pattern is measured with sufficient signal to noise ratio an iterative technique can be used to solve for the transmission function of the sample. The technique offers extremely high resolution reconstructions of a sample