New developments in synchrotron-based microtomography

State-of-the-art synchrotron-based microtomography devices have nowadays to fulfill very stringent requirements in term of spatial resolution, detection efficiency and data throughput. The most used detection system is based on collecting the light produced by a thin scintillation screen with microscope optics and conveying it to a high-performance charge coupled device (CCD) camera. With the chip-size of currently available CCDs installed at high brilliance sources like the Swiss Light Source (SLS) raw data are produced at rate of gigabyte/minute. It is crucial therefore to provide the necessary infrastructure to be able to post-process the data in real time, and provide to the user 3D information immediately after the end of the scan. The visible-light-based detection system is intrinsically limited by scintillation properties, optical coupling and CCD granularity to a practical limit of about 1 micron spatial resolution and efficiency of a few percent. A novel detector, called Bragg magnifier, is one of the techniques recently proposed to efficiently trespass the micrometer barrier. It exploits two-dimensional asymmetric Bragg diffraction from flat crystals to produce X-ray images with magnification factors up to 150x150 and pixel sizes less than 100x100 nm2. The infrastructure devoted to microtomography at the SLS is described, as well as some very promising experiments. The layout of a novel, tomography dedicated beamline is also presented.

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