Hybrid single-beam reconstruction technique for slow and fast varying wave fields

An iterative single-beam wave field reconstruction technique that employs both non-paraxial, wave propagation based and paraxial deterministic phase retrieval techniques is presented. This approach overcomes two major obstacles that exist in the current state of the art techniques: iterative methods do not reconstruct slowly varying wave fields due to slow convergence and stagnation, and deterministic methods have paraxial limits, making the reconstructions of quickly varying object features impossible. In this work, a hybrid approach is reported that uses paraxial wave field corrections within iterative phase retrieval solvers. This technique is suitable for cases ranging from slow to fast varying wave fields, and unlike the currently available methods, can also reconstruct measurement objects with different regions of both slowly and quickly varying object features. It is further shown that this technique gives a higher accuracy than current single-beam phase retrieval techniques, and in comparison to the iterative methods, has a higher convergence speed.