SHARP—a 'killer app' for ptychography
Ptychography, a revolutionary x-ray imaging technique that combines diffraction and microscopy, has now been coupled with applied mathematics and high-performance computing to quickly turn high-throughput "imaging by diffraction" datasets into the sharpest three-dimensional images ever produced. A joint collaboration between the Advanced Light Source (ALS), Uppsala University, and researchers at the Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications (CAMERA) has led to SHARP (Scalable Heterogeneous Adaptive Real-time Ptychography), which is an algorithmic framework and computer software for the fast reconstruction of images from ptychographic data used at the ALS. With the image-processing tools provided by SHARP, every scanning microscope can now add a parallel detector, and every diffraction imaging instrument can add a scanning stage to take advantage of this groundbreaking technique.
