The fluence–resolution relationship in holographic and coherent diffractive imaging

Abstract

This work presents a numerical study of the fluence–resolution behaviour for two coherent lensless X-ray imaging techniques. To this end the fluence–resolution relationship of inline near-field holography and far-field coherent diffractive imaging are compared in numerical experiments. To achieve this, the phase reconstruction is carried out using iterative phase-retrieval algorithms on simulated noisy data. Using the incident photon fluence on the specimen as the control parameter, the achievable resolution for two example phantoms (cell and bitmap) is studied. The results indicate the superior performance of holography compared with coherent diffractive imaging, for the same fluence and phase-reconstruction procedure.