Abstract
Tailoring structural, chemical, and electronic (dis-)order in heterogeneous media is one of the transformative opportunities to enable new functionalities and sciences in energy and quantum materials. This endeavor requires elemental, chemical, and magnetic sensitivities at the nano/atomic scale in two- and three-dimensional space. Soft X-ray radiation and hard X-ray radiation provided by synchrotron facilities have emerged as standard characterization probes owing to their inherent element-specificity and high intensity. One of the most promising methods in view of sensitivity and spatial resolution is coherent diffraction imaging, namely, X-ray ptychography, which is envisioned to take on the dominance of electron imaging techniques offering with atomic resolution in the age of diffraction limited light sources. In this review, we discuss the current research examples of far-field diffraction-based X-ray ptychography on two-dimensional and three-dimensional semiconductors, ferroelectrics, and ferromagnets and their blooming future as a mainstream tool for materials sciences.
Highlights
Developments in semiconductor and spin-based nano-electronical devices during the past few decades have been driving scientists and engineers to invent advanced imaging methods to provide solutions for the characterization of next-generation nano-devices
coherent X-ray diffraction imaging (CXDI) data reconstructions sometimes can result in non-unique inversion solutions, and the elegant amalgamation of scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM) with CXDI, namely ptychography, has the potential to address this fundamental problem that poses an obstacle in CXDI
The maximum-likelihood is an extension on the original PIE36 and difference-map,[37,38] which incorporates the character of Gaussian or Poisson photon counting and the associated photon noises in real experiments into the ptychographic iterative algorithms to optimize data inversion quality
Summary
Developments in semiconductor and spin-based nano-electronical devices during the past few decades have been driving scientists and engineers to invent advanced imaging methods to provide solutions for the characterization of next-generation nano-devices. The technique was first experimentally demonstrated by Eisebitt et al.[14] and applied to magnetic thin film domain systems.[15] Another reciprocal-space imaging technique that was invented about two decades ago is coherent X-ray diffraction imaging (CXDI). CXDI in reflection geometry has been demonstrated.[21] The fundamental principle behind CXDI is the use of advanced iterative algorithms to reconstruct the real-space complex sample wavefunction through reciprocal-space coherent diffraction intensities with a stringent oversampling criterion.[22] CXDI data reconstructions sometimes can result in non-unique inversion solutions, and the elegant amalgamation of scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM) with CXDI, namely ptychography, has the potential to address this fundamental problem that poses an obstacle in CXDI.
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