
Collection of a ptychographic imaging data set in the simplest single-aperture configuration. (a) Coherent illumination incident from the left is locally confined onto an area of the specimen. A detector downstream of the specimen records an interference pattern. (b) The specimen is shifted (in this case, upwards) and a second pattern is recorded. Note that regions of illumination must overlap with one another to facilitate ptychographic shift-invariance constraint. (c) A whole ptychographic data set uses many overlapping regions of illumination. (d) The entire data set is four-dimensional: for each 2D illumination position (x , y), there is a 2D diffraction pattern (kx, ky).
Credit: 22sm22, Wikipedia