Lensless diffractive imaging using tabletop coherent high-harmonic soft-X-ray beams.

We present the first experimental demonstration of lensless diffractive imaging using coherent soft x rays generated by a tabletop soft-x-ray source. A 29 nm high harmonic beam illuminates an object, and the subsequent diffraction is collected on an x-ray CCD camera. High dynamic range diffraction patterns are obtained by taking multiple exposures while blocking small-angle diffraction using beam blocks of varying size. These patterns reconstruct to images with 214 nm resolution. This work demonstrates a practical tabletop lensless microscope that promises to find applications in materials science, nanoscience, and biology.

[1]  John C. H. Spence,et al.  Experimental High-Resolution Electron Microscopy , 1980 .

[2]  J R Fienup,et al.  Phase retrieval algorithms: a comparison. , 1982, Applied optics.

[3]  Dennis L. Matthews,et al.  Demonstration of X-ray Holography with an X-ray Laser , 1987, Science.

[4]  M. Murnane,et al.  Phase-matched generation of coherent soft X-rays , 1998, Science.

[5]  J. Miao,et al.  Phase retrieval from the magnitude of the Fourier transforms of nonperiodic objects , 1998 .

[6]  D. Attwood.  Soft X-Rays and Extreme Ultraviolet Radiation , 1999 .

[7]  J. Miao,et al.  Extending the methodology of X-ray crystallography to allow imaging of micrometre-sized non-crystalline specimens , 1999, Nature.

[8]  Andrew G. Glen,et al.  APPL , 2001 .

[9]  Randy A. Bartels,et al.  Generation of Spatially Coherent Light at Extreme Ultraviolet Wavelengths , 2002, Science.

[10]  Stella M. Hurtley,et al.  The Future Looks Bright ... , 2003, Science.

[11]  J. Miao,et al.  Phase retrieval of diffraction patterns from noncrystalline samples using the oversampling method , 2003 .

[12]  S. Backus,et al.  Quasi-phase-matched generation of coherent extreme-ultraviolet light , 2003, Nature.

[13]  M. L. Le Gros,et al.  X-ray tomography generates 3-D reconstructions of the yeast, saccharomyces cerevisiae, at 60-nm resolution. , 2003, Molecular biology of the cell.

[14]  I. Christov,et al.  Highly coherent light at 13 nm generated by use of quasi-phase-matched high-harmonic generation. , 2004, Optics letters.

[15]  S. Eisebitt,et al.  Lensless imaging of magnetic nanostructures by X-ray spectro-holography , 2004, Nature.

[16]  Henry C. Kapteyn,et al.  Extreme Nonlinear Optics: Coherent X rays from Lasers , 2005 .

[17]  E. Anderson,et al.  Soft X-ray microscopy at a spatial resolution better than 15 nm , 2005, Nature.

[18]  J. Kirz,et al.  Biological imaging by soft x-ray diffraction microscopy , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[19]  M Wieland,et al.  Toward time-resolved soft X-ray microscopy using pulsed fs-high-harmonic radiation. , 2005, Ultramicroscopy.

[20]  E. Anderson,et al.  Soft X-ray microscopy of nanomagnetism , 2006 .

[21]  Garth J. Williams,et al.  Three-dimensional mapping of a deformation field inside a nanocrystal , 2006, Nature.

[22]  W. H. Benner,et al.  Femtosecond diffractive imaging with a soft-X-ray free-electron laser , 2006, physics/0610044.

[23]  D. Paterson,et al.  Diffractive imaging of highly focused X-ray fields , 2006 .

[24]  D. Attwood.  Soft X-Rays and Extreme Ultraviolet Radiation , 1999 .

[25]  O. Cohen,et al.  Quasi-phase-matching and quantum-path control of high-harmonic generation using counterpropagating light , 2007 .

[26]  M M Murnane,et al.  Probe of high-order harmonic generation in a hollow waveguide geometry using counterpropagating light. , 2007, Physical review letters.

[27]  J. Miao,et al.  Phase retrieval from exactly oversampled diffraction intensity through deconvolution , 2007 .