  A new phasing algorithm has been used to determine the phases of diffuse
elastic X-ray scattering from a non-periodic array of gold balls of 50 nm
diameter. Two-dimensional real-space images, showing the charge-density
distribution of the balls, have been reconstructed at 50 nm resolution from
transmission diffraction patterns recorded at 550 eV energy. The reconstructed
image fits well with scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of the same
sample. The algorithm, which uses only the density modification portion of the
SIR2002 program, is compared with the results obtained via the
Gerchberg-Saxton-Fienup HIO algorithm. In this way the relationship between
density modification in crystallography and the HiO algorithm used in signal
and image processing is elucidated.
