Coherence and Speckles — Matilde Fernandes’ Master Thesis Defense

Last week, Matilde Fernandes successfully defended her Master’s thesis, titled “Incoherent Diffraction Imaging with Hard X-rays: Single-shot Characterization of 2D Spatial Coherence of a Focused X-ray Beam”, making important contributions to the NanoXcan project.

Her work focused on the generation and characterization of speckle patterns suitable for Incoherent Diffraction Imaging (IDI) — a promising lensless imaging technique compatible with partially coherent X-ray sources. The study was carried out at the Nanoscopium beamline at SOLEIL, where Matilde used custom-designed diffusers to produce fully developed speckle patterns.

She also performed a single-shot spatial coherence analysis, extracting both qualitative and quantitative measurements of the transverse coherence length and global degree of coherence. The results confirmed the expected inverse dependence on source size and validated the diffuser design within this regime.

Congratulations to Matilde for the excellent work!