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Ever brighter light sources, fast parallel detectors and advances in phase retrieval methods have made ptychography a practical and popular imaging technique. Compared to previous techniques, ptychography provides superior robustness and resolution at the expense of more advanced and time-consuming data analysis. By taking advantage of massively parallel architectures, high-throughput processing can expedite this analysis and provide microscopists with immediate feedback. These advances allow real-time imaging at wavelength-limited resolution, coupled with a large field of view. This article describes a set of algorithmic and computational methodologies used at the Advanced Light Source and US Department of Energy light sources. These are packaged as a CUDA-based software environment named SHARP (http://camera.lbl.gov/sharp), aimed at providing state-of-the-art high-throughput ptychography reconstructions for the coming era of diffraction-limited light sources.The SHARP framework provides fast images from high-throughput ptychographic datasets and a corner stone for demanding higher-dimensional analysis such as spectro-ptychography or tomo-ptychography.

Theory predicts that, with an ultrashort and extremely bright coherent X-ray pulse, a single diffraction pattern may be recorded from a large macromolecule, a virus or a cell before the sample explodes and turns into a plasma. Here we report the first experimental demonstration of this principle using the FLASH soft-X-ray free-electron laser. An intense 25 fs, 4×10 13 W cm -2 pulse, containing 10 12 photons at 32 nm wavelength, produced a coherent diffraction pattern from a nanostructured non-periodic object, before destroying it at 60,000 K. A novel X-ray camera assured single-photon detection sensitivity by filtering out parasitic scattering and plasma radiation. The reconstructed image, obtained directly from the coherent pattern by phase retrieval through oversampling, shows no measurable damage, and is reconstructed at the diffraction-limited resolution. A three-dimensional data set may be assembled from such images when copies of a reproducible sample are exposed to the beam one by one. © 2006 Nature Publishing Group.