2025/07/28 by Abhishek Mall, Mall, Abhishek, Zhou Shen +3
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced X-ray Imaging Techniques #Crystallography and Radiation Phenomena #Data Analysis #FOS: Electrical engineering #FOS: Physical sciences #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Optics (physics.optics) #Particle Accelerators and Free-Electron Lasers #Statistics and Probability (physics.data-an) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.07953
openalex publication_date 2025/07/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
X-ray single particle imaging (SPI) has offered the potential to visualize structures of biomolecules at near-atomic resolution. However, state-of-the-art structures at X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) are limited to moderate resolution, primarily due to background scattering. We computationally explore a modified SPI technique based on holographic enhancement from a strongly scattering 2D crystal lattice placed near the object. The Bragg peaks from the crystal enable structure retrieval even for background levels up to 105 times higher than the object signal. This method could enable SPI at more widely accessible synchrotron sources, where even detection of objects before radiation damage is nearly impossible currently, supports practical fixed-target sample delivery, and enables high-resolution imaging under near-native conditions. Numerical simulations with a custom reconstruction algorithm to recover the latent parameters show the potential to improve the achievable resolution while also expanding the accessibility to the technique.