Franz Pfeiffer

An X-ray image of a battery looks like a photo taken through frosted glass: fine details blur into a gray smudge. The culprit is the detector itself, which cannot distinguish features smaller than its pixel size. Engineers proposed getting around this barrier by illuminating the sample not with a uniform beam but with a striped pattern.

An X-ray machine with gratings takes not one but three pictures at once: a regular image, a map of beam deflections invisible to the eye, and an image of tiny structures that scatter light. Together, they help spot, for example, emphysema or pulmonary fibrosis. But there's a catch: to separate these three layers, you need a clever mathematical trick.