Abstract

Soft X-ray microscopy is rapidly becoming a powerful technique for ultrahigh-resolution imaging of nanoscale objects [1]. Soft X-ray radiation can be used to obtain both spatial and spectroscopic information by exploiting atomic inner shell excitations as a contrast mechanism. The water-window spectral range (2 - 4.5 nm wavelength) provides natural contrast for biology, allowing imaging of intact cells [2]. Imaging at such short wavelengths is challenging due to the lack of suitable imaging optics. Lensless imaging methods are a powerful alternative [3], but require coherent, monochromatic sources. This has limited soft X-ray imaging mostly to large-scale facilities such as XFELs and synchrotrons, as table-top high-harmonic generation (HHG) sources need to be strongly spectrally filtered, reducing their already modest flux by orders of magnitude.

© 2013 IEEE