Diffractive imaging of highly focused X-ray fields

Abstract

The rapid development of new sources of coherent X-rays, such as third-generation synchrotrons, high-harmonic-generation lasers1 and X-ray free-electron lasers 2 , has led to the emergence of the new field of X-ray coherent science. The extension of coherent methods to the X-ray regime makes possible methods such as coherent diffraction, X-ray photon-correlation spectroscopy, speckle interferometry and ultrafast probing at atomic resolution and femtosecond timescales. Despite rapid improvements in the resolution that conventional X-ray optics can achieve, new methods for manipulating X-rays are required to push this to the atomic scale 3 . Here we demonstrate a coherent imaging technique tha..