In situ coherent diffractive imaging

Yuan Hung Lo,Weikun Xiao,Arjun Rana,Lingrong Zhao,B C Regan,Jianwei Miao,Marcus Gallagher-Jones,Jared J Lodico

doi:10.1038/s41467-018-04259-9

Abstract

Coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) has been widely applied in the physical and biological sciences using synchrotron radiation, X-ray free-electron laser, high harmonic generation, electrons, and optical lasers. One of CDI’s important applications is to probe dynamic phenomena with high spatiotemporal resolution. Here, we report the development of a general in situ CDI method for real-time imaging of dynamic processes in solution. By introducing a time-invariant overlapping region as real-space constraint, we simultaneously reconstructed a time series of complex exit wave of dynamic processes with robust and fast convergence. We validated this method using optical laser experiments and numerical simulations with coherent X-rays. Our numerical simulations further indicated that in situ CDI can potentially reduce radiation dose by more than an order of magnitude relative to conventional CDI. With further development, we envision in situ CDI could be applied to probe a range of dynamic phenomena in the future.

Highlights

Coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) has been widely applied in the physical and biological sciences using synchrotron radiation, X-ray free-electron laser, high harmonic generation, electrons, and optical lasers
We demonstrate a general in situ CDI method to simultaneously reconstruct time-evolving complex exit waves of dynamic processes with spatial resolution only limited by diffraction signals
By enforcing a time-invariant overlapping region as a powerful realspace constraint, in situ CDI is robust to incomplete data and noise, and it can simultaneously reconstruct a time series of complex exit waves to reveal fine structural changes between frames without being trapped in local minima

Summary

Introduction

Coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) has been widely applied in the physical and biological sciences using synchrotron radiation, X-ray free-electron laser, high harmonic generation, electrons, and optical lasers. By introducing a time-invariant overlapping region as real-space constraint, we simultaneously reconstructed a time series of complex exit wave of dynamic processes with robust and fast convergence We validated this method using optical laser experiments and numerical simulations with coherent X-rays. We demonstrate a general in situ CDI method to simultaneously reconstruct time-evolving complex exit waves of dynamic processes with spatial resolution only limited by diffraction signals. By introducing both static and dynamic regions in the experimental geometry, we apply the static region as a powerful time-invariant constraint to reconstruct dynamic processes with fast and robust convergence. By varying the incident X-ray flux between the static and dynamic regions, we demonstrate through numerical simulations that in situ CDI can potentially reduce the radiation dose to radiation sensitive samples by more than an order of magnitude relative to conventional CDI

Methods

Results

Conclusion