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We demonstrate live-updating ptychographic reconstruction with ePIE, an iterative ptychography method, during ongoing data acquisition. The reconstruction starts with a small subset of the total data, and as the acquisition proceeds the data used for reconstruction is extended. This creates a live-updating view of object and illumination that allows monitoring the ongoing experiment and adjusting parameters with quick turn-around. This is particularly advantageous for long-running acquisitions. We show that such a gradual reconstruction yields interpretable results already with a small subset of the data. We show simulated live processing with various scan patterns, parallelized reconstruction, and real-world live processing at the hard X-ray ptychographic nanoanalytical microscope PtyNAMi at the PETRA III beamline.

In this thesis, an extension of the existing localization system of the ABSOLUT project is presented, with the aim of making it more resistant to GNSS errors. This enhanced system is based on the integration of a LiDAR sensor. Initially, a 3D map of the traversed route is created using the LiDAR sensor. This process employs an existing factor graph-based SLAM algorithm, which is made more stable and accurate through the inclusion of a surveyed elevation profile of the environment, the integration of vehicle odometry sensors, and bias estimates of the IMU. The generated map is used during the drive to determine the vehicle's position by comparing it with the currently captured point clouds. This procedure relies on a newly developed Error-State Kalman Filter that fuses LiDAR odometry with absolute LiDAR position estimates. To optimally use the pose estimation from the various sensor systems, an approach is proposed that adaptively combines the estimates based on the environment. The performance of the developed system is evaluated using real driving data.

Scanning coherent X-ray microscopy (ptychography) has gained considerable interest during the last decade since the performance of this indirect imaging technique does not necessarily rely on the quality of the X-ray optics and, in principle, can achieve highest spatial resolution in X-ray imaging. The method can be easily extended to 3D by adding standard tomographic reconstruction schemes. However, the tomographic reconstruction is often applied in a subsequent step using a sequence of aligned ptychographic 2D projections. In this contribution, we outline current developments of a GPU-accelerated framework for direct 3D ptychography, coupling 2D ptychography and tomography. The program utilizes a custom GPU-accelerated framework for ptychography that offers three distinct ptychographic reconstruction algorithms. The tomographic reconstruction runs simultaneously and uses numerical routines of the ASTRA Toolbox. This parallel-computing approach results in a high performance increase considerably reducing the reconstruction time of 3D ptychographic datasets.

Ptychography is a computational imaging method used to numerically retrieve the projection of an object from a set of measured diffraction patterns. Each diffraction pattern represents a partially overlapping area of the object. The corresponding inverse problem, i.e. the image reconstruction, can be solved by projection-based or gradient-based algorithms. However, existing implementations are usually optimized for a specific system and therefore difficult to port to new systems. To solve this problem, we will be introducing the alpaka library with a generic C++ interface to implement an algorithm one time and execute it on different target platforms, like CPUs and GPUs from different vendors. First, we ported an existing algorithm, implemented in CUDA C++, to alpaka to demonstrate the workflow and advantages. Then, we implemented another algorithm from scratch to obtain the software requirements for an easy and fast development cycle of alpaka based image reconstruction applications.

In December 2018, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission deployed a seismometer on the surface of Mars. In preparation for the data analysis, in July 2017, the marsquake service initiated a blind test in which participants were asked to detect and characterize seismicity embedded in a one Earth year long synthetic data set of continuous waveforms. Synthetic data were computed for a single station, mimicking the streams that will be available from InSight as well as the expected tectonic and impact seismicity, and noise conditions on Mars (Clinton et al., 2017). In total, 84 teams from 20 countries registered for the blind test and 11 of them submitted their results in early 2018. The collection of documentations, methods, ideas, and codes submitted by the participants exceeds 100 pages. The teams proposed well established as well as novel methods to tackle the challenging target of building a global seismicity catalog using a single station. This article summarizes the performance of the teams and highlights the most successful contributions.

We present an improved nanofabrication method of high aspect ratio tungsten structures for use in high efficiency nanofocusing hard X-ray zone plates. A ZEP 7000 electron beam resist layer used for patterning is cured by a second, much larger electron dose after development. The curing step improves pattern transfer fidelity into a chromium hard mask by reactive ion etching using Cl2/O2 chemistry. The pattern can then be transferred into an underlying tungsten layer by another reactive ion etching step using SF6/O2. A 630 nm-thick tungsten zone plate with smallest line width of 30 nm was fabricated using this method and characterized. At 8.2 keV photon energy the device showed an efficiency of 2.2% with a focal spot size at the diffraction limit, measured at Diamond Light Source I-13-1 beamline., QC 20160128