Journal of Synchrotron Radiation (Sep 2024)

Correcting angular distortions in Bragg coherent X-ray diffraction imaging

  • Huaiyu Chen,
  • Dmitry Dzhigaev,
  • Alexander Björling,
  • Fabian Westermeier,
  • Mikhail Lyubomirskiy,
  • Michael Stuckelberger,
  • Jesper Wallentin

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1107/S1600577524006507
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 31, no. 5
pp. 1308 – 1316

Abstract

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Bragg coherent X-ray diffraction imaging (BCDI) has emerged as a powerful technique for strain imaging and morphology reconstruction of nanometre-scale crystals. However, BCDI often suffers from angular distortions that appear during data acquisition, caused by radiation pressure, heating or imperfect scanning stages. This limits the applicability of BCDI, in particular for small crystals and high-flux X-ray beams. Here, we present a pre-processing algorithm that recovers the 3D datasets from the BCDI dataset measured under the impact of large angular distortions. We systematically investigate the performance of this method for different levels of distortion and find that the algorithm recovers the correct angles for distortions up to 16.4× (1640%) the angular step size dθ = 0.004°. We also show that the angles in a continuous scan can be recovered with high accuracy. As expected, the correction provides marked improvements in the subsequent phase retrieval.

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