Reference-enhanced X-ray Single Particle Imaging

Abstract: X-ray single particle imaging involves the measurement of a large number of noisy diffraction patterns of isolated objects in random orientations. The missing information about these patterns is then computationally recovered in order to obtain a three-dimensional structure of the particle. While the method has promised to deliver room temperature structures at near-atomic resolution, there have been significant experimental hurdles in collecting data of sufficient quality and quantity to achieve this goal. This paper describes two ways to modify the conventional methodology which significantly ease the experimental challenges, at the cost of additional computational complexity in the reconstruction procedure. Both these methods involve the use of holographic reference objects in close proximity to the sample of interest, whose structure can be described with only a few parameters. A reconstruction algorithm to recover the unknown degrees of freedom is also proposed and tested with toy-model simulations.