Coherent X-ray Diffraction Imaging of Nanostructures

TL;DR

This paper reviews Coherent X-ray Diffraction Imaging (CXDI), emphasizing recent advances enabled by X-ray Free-Electron Lasers for nanoscale structural analysis of crystals.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of CXDI techniques, including formalism, experimental applications, and recent developments with XFELs for nanostructure imaging.

Findings

Demonstrated CXDI's application to nanoscale crystalline structures.

Highlighted the use of XFELs for fast serial crystallography.

Outlined formalism for coherent scattering from strained finite crystals.

Abstract

We present here an overview of Coherent X-ray Diffraction Imaging (CXDI) with its application to nanostructures. This imaging approach has become especially important recently due to advent of X-ray Free-Electron Lasers (XFEL) and its applications to the fast developing technique of serial X-ray crystallography. We start with the basic description of coherent scattering on the finite size crystals. The difference between conventional crystallography applied to large samples and coherent scattering on the finite size samples is outlined. The formalism of coherent scattering from a finite size crystal with a strain field is considered. Partially coherent illumination of a crystalline sample is developed. Recent experimental examples demonstrating applications of CXDI to the study of crystalline structures on the nanoscale, including experiments at FELs, are also presented.