Demonstration of X-ray Holography with an X-ray Laser

X-ray holography offers the potential for obtaining high resolution three-dimensional images of in vitro biological microstructures. Significant progress toward this goal has been achieved with holography systems using synchrotron x-ray sources and recently spatial resolutions as small as 40 nm have been demonstrated. These experiments required x-ray exposures of an hour or longer, which makes high spatial resolution difficult to achieve in live biological specimens because of blurring of the image. This blurring is caused by specimen motion and will prohibit the imaging of dynamical processes within the specimen. A possible solution to this problem is to exploit the extremely high brightness and long coherence lengths produced by x-ray lasers and create the hologram with exposure times of less than 1 nsec. This report presents the results from an experiment in which an x-ray laser was used to produce x-ray holograms. The holography geometry used was a Gabor in-line type modified by the inclusion of a high reflectivity multi-layer x-ray mirror used as a narrow bandpass filter. The x-ray mirror had a flatness and roughness of less than X/100 (where X is the wavelength) at the x-ray laser wavelengths.