Table-top X-ray diffraction microscopy

The use of coherent X-rays makes it possible to replace lenses by signal processing in X-ray imaging techniques, as demonstrated for the first time in 1999 (See, J. Miao et al., Nature, 400, 342 (1999)). The current state-of-the-art technique uses radiation produced by a free-electron laser, which, in a single shot, images with a temporal resolution of 25 fs and a spatial resolution of 90 nm. Very recently, a group led by Professors H. Kapteyn and M. Murnane (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA) has succeeded in performing this kind of measurement in an ordinary laboratory, instead of at a synchrotron facility, using 29 nm soft X-rays generated as 25-31^th order harmonics from a 1.3 mJ, 25 fs, Ti:S laser. The team collected scattering from the sample by means of an X-ray CCD camera. The spatial resolution of the reconstructed images is 214 nm. For more information, see the paper, "Lensless Diffractive Imaging Using Tabletop Coherent High-Harmonic Soft-X-Ray Beams", R. L. Sandberg et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 098103 (2007)