A method for correcting the effect of specimen drift on coherent diffractive imaging

Abstract

Coherent diffractive imaging involves the inversion of a diffraction pattern to find the wave function at the exit-surface plane of the specimen. It is a promising technique for imaging, for example, nanoparticles with electrons and biological molecules with X-rays. If the illumination is not a plane wave of infinite extent, then a relative drift between the illumination and the object introduces errors into the diffraction pattern; an issue which is often overlooked. This may be of particular importance for applications with electron microscopes which use nanoscale probes. Here we show that beams which are uniform over a sufficiently large region can be used to pose a phase retrieval proble..