Hard-X-Ray Lensless Imaging of Extended Objects

TLDR

The authors present a hard‑X‑ray microscope that operates without a lens and is not restricted to small fields of view or finite‑size objects. The microscope reconstructs objects without a lens, using a lensless phase‑retrieval approach that requires no a priori knowledge of the transmission function, accommodating both modulus and phase. The method eliminates typical constraints of conventional phase‑retrieval imaging, reduces calculation times by roughly a thousandfold, and offers revolutionary potential for imaging all specimen classes.

Abstract

We demonstrate a hard-x-ray microscope that does not use a lens and is not limited to a small field of view or an object of finite size. The method does not suffer any of the physical constraints, convergence problems, or defocus ambiguities that often arise in conventional phase-retrieval diffractive imaging techniques. Calculation times are about a thousand times shorter than in current iterative algorithms. We need no a priori knowledge about the object, which can be a transmission function with both modulus and phase components. The technique has revolutionary implications for x-ray imaging of all classes of specimen.