  This paper develops a novel framework for phase retrieval, a problem which
arises in X-ray crystallography, diffraction imaging, astronomical imaging and
many other applications. Our approach combines multiple structured
illuminations together with ideas from convex programming to recover the phase
from intensity measurements, typically from the modulus of the diffracted wave.
We demonstrate empirically that any complex-valued object can be recovered from
the knowledge of the magnitude of just a few diffracted patterns by solving a
simple convex optimization problem inspired by the recent literature on matrix
completion. More importantly, we also demonstrate that our noise-aware
algorithms are stable in the sense that the reconstruction degrades gracefully
as the signal-to-noise ratio decreases. Finally, we introduce some theory
showing that one can design very simple structured illumination patterns such
that three diffracted figures uniquely determine the phase of the object we
wish to recover.
