Phase retrieval problems in x-ray physics

In phase retrieval problems that occur in imaging by coherent x-ray diffraction, one tries to reconstruct information about a sample of interest from possibly noisy intensity measurements of the wave fi eld traversing the sample. The mathematical formulation of these problems bases on some assumptions. Usually one of them is that the x-ray wave fi eld is generated by a point source. In order to address this very idealized assumption, it is common to perform a data preprocessing step, the so-called empty beam correction. Within this work, we study the validity of this approach by presenting a quantitative error estimate. Moreover, in order to solve these phase retrieval problems, we want to incorporate a priori knowledge about the structure of the noise and the solution into the reconstruction process. For this reason, the application of a problem adapted iteratively regularized Newton-type method becomes particularly attractive. This method includes the solution of a convex minimization problem in each iteration step. We present a method for solving general optimization problems of this form. Our method is a generalization of a commonly used algorithm which makes it efficiently applicable to a wide class of problems. We also proof convergence results and show the performance of our method by numerical examples.