Coherent diffraction imaging of a progressively deformed nanocrystal

Imaging ordered materials with coherent x rays holds great potential to improve our understanding of phenomena in complex materials systems where emergent behavior can arise due to coupling of spin, lattice, and orbital degrees of freedom. Coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) is a lensless imaging technique for probing the structure of materials in three dimensions. Central to the success of the CDI method is the inversion of propagated wave field information to recover a quantitative image of the illuminated crystalline structure. Present challenges faced with existing approaches to image recovery are often due to nonuniqueness of wave propagated forms of the electron density information that can cause prohibitive stagnation of the reconstruction algorithm. Here we report on a major advancement in image recovery that is able to recover the three-dimensional image of a 492 nm gold single crystal undergoing progressive deformation to a highly strained condition without the use of a priori information. Our findings also demonstrate the significance of robust image recovery techniques for revealing high resolution topological structure.