Nanoscience has been one of the major research focuses of the U.S. and much of the world for the past decade, in part because of its promise to revolutionize many fields, including materials, medicine, and electronics. At the heart of this promise is the fact that nanostructured materials can behave radically differently than their macroscopic counterparts (e.g., bulk gold is such an inert metal that it has found applications in such diverse fields as jewelry, biomedical implants and dentistry, whereas gold nanoparticles are highly reactive and are thus useful as nanocatalysts) and have properties that are tunable due to a strong dependence on the size and surface area of the nanostructure. Thus, nanoscience offers a remarkable opportunity to develop new functional systems built around nanostructured materials with unusual and tunable properties and functionality. The transition from nanoscience to nanotechnology becomes possible when nanostructured systems can be made reproducibly by processes that can be implemented on a large scale. The microelectronics industry is one example of an industry that has evolved into the realm of nanotechnology, since the exponential reduction in feature size in computer chips has resulted in feature sizes now under 50nm (45nm in production, 32nm demonstrated; feature size …

Lensless X-ray imaging techniques such as coherent diffraction imaging and ptychography, and Fourier transform holography can provide time-resolved, diffraction-limited images. Nearly all examples of these techniques have focused on transmission geometry, restricting the samples and reciprocal spaces that can be investigated. We report a lensless X-ray technique developed for imaging in Bragg and small-angle scattering geometries, which may also find application in transmission geometries. We demonstrate this by imaging a nanofabricated pseudorandom binary structure in small-angle reflection geometry. The technique can be used with extended objects, places no restriction on sample size, and requires no additional sample masking. The realization of X-ray lensless imaging in reflection geometry opens up the possibility of single-shot imaging of surfaces in thin films, buried interfaces in magnetic multilayers, organic photovoltaic and field-effect transistor devices, or Bragg planes in a single crystal.

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