Oversampling an object using Fraunhofer diffraction ensures a continuous diffraction pattern. This oversampling technique ensures that the background intensity in the frame surrounding the object remains uniform. An application to dynamic diffraction patterns is the study of the locomotory behavior of microscopic biological species. Almost all studies of microscopic species are conducted on microscope slides so that the species are constrained to two dimensions.  Using diffraction with a collimated low intensity laser beam frees the species from the image plain. We choose C. elegans as a microscopic species to demonstrate the chaotic locomotion of the worms.

In addition, dynamic diffraction allows for the optical production of a single time series in complex space that contains information about the time evolution of every single point in real space. This complex time series contains information on locomotory cycles, embedding dimensions and the largest Lyapunov exponent (LLE). Here we distinguish two different phenotypes ofC. elegans, a nematode, by calculating LLE's. The importance of switching behavior will be discussed.