Speckle based X-ray wavefront sensing with nanoradian angular sensitivity

Abstract

X-ray wavefront sensing techniques play an important role in both in situ metrology of X-ray optics and X-ray phase contrast imaging. In this letter, we report an approach to measure wavefront aberrations simply using abrasive paper. The wavefront phase change induced by the sample under test was extracted from the speckle displacement by applying a cross-correlation algorithm to two series of speckle images collected using two one-dimensional scans, whilst scanning the abrasive paper in a transverse direction to the incident X-ray beam. The angular sensitivity of the proposed method is shown to be around 2 nanoradians. The potential of the proposed technique for characterizing X-ray optics and the study of biomedical specimens is demonstrated by imaging representative samples.