Anisotropic nano-scale resolution in 3D Bragg coherent diffraction imaging

TL;DR

This paper reveals that 3D Bragg coherent diffraction imaging resolution varies with direction, introduces a metric to measure this anisotropic resolution, and discusses its dependence on dosage for future synchrotron applications.

Contribution

It introduces a new metric for assessing directional resolution in 3D Bragg coherent diffraction imaging and demonstrates resolution improvements over previous methods.

Findings

Direction-dependent resolution of 4-9nm achieved

Resolution is approximately twice as high as previous measurements

Resolution depends on dosage, impacting future synchrotron imaging

Abstract

We demonstrate that the resolution of three-dimensional (3D) real-space images obtained from Bragg x-ray coherent diffraction measurements is direction dependent. We propose and demonstrate the effectiveness of a metric to determine the spatial resolution of images that accounts for the direc- tional dependence. The measured direction dependent resolution of ~ 4-9nm is about 2 times higher than the best previously obtained 3D measurements. Finally, we quantify the relationship between the resolution of recovered real-space images and dosage, and discuss its implications in the light of next generation synchrotrons.