Ptychographic imaging with a compact gas-discharge plasma extreme ultraviolet light source.

Abstract

We report the demonstration of a scanning probe coherent diffractive imaging method (also known as ptychographic CDI) using a compact and partially coherent gas-discharge plasma source of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation at a 17.3 nm wavelength. Until now, CDI has been mainly carried out with coherent, high-brightness light sources, such as third generation synchrotrons, x-ray free-electron lasers, and high harmonic generation. Here we performed ptychographic lensless imaging of an extended sample using a compact, lab-scale source. The CDI reconstructions were achieved by applying constraint relaxation to the CDI algorithm. Experimental results indicate that our method can handle the low spatial coherence and broadband nature of the EUV illumination, as well as the residual background due to visible light emitted by the gas-discharge source. The ability to conduct ptychographic imaging with lab-scale and partially coherent EUV sources is expected to significantly expand the applications of this powerful CDI method.