Thermal x-ray diffraction and near-field phase contrast imaging

¹ SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory - Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA
² Center for Free-Electron Laser Science, DESY - Notkestr. 85, D-22607 Hamburg, Germany
³ Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter - D-22761 Hamburg, Germany
⁴ Institut für Optik, Information und Photonik, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg - D-91058 Erlangen, Germany
⁵ Erlangen Graduate School in Advanced Optical Technologies (SAOT), Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg D-91052 Erlangen, Germany
⁶ Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University - College Station, TX 77843, USA
⁷ Institute of Physics and Institute of Plasma Physics, Academy of Science of Czech Republic Na Slovance 1999/2, 18221 Prague 8, Czech Republic
⁸ Department of Physics, University of Hamburg - Jungiusstrae 9, D-20355 Hamburg, Germany
⁹ Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging - Luruper Chaussee 149, D-22761 Hamburg, Germany
¹⁰ Department of Physics, University of Maryland - Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA

^(a) zheng.li@desy.de
^(b) shih@umbc.edu

Received: 4 August 2017
Accepted: 21 November 2017

Abstract

Using higher-order coherence of thermal light sources, the resolution power of standard x-ray imaging techniques can be enhanced. In this work, we applied the higher-order measurement to far-field x-ray diffraction and near-field phase contrast imaging (PCI), in order to achieve superresolution in x-ray diffraction and obtain enhanced intensity contrast in PCI. The cost of implementing such schemes is minimal compared to the methods that achieve similar effects by using entangled x-ray photon pairs.