For almost two decades, the TOMCAT beamline has been providing cutting-edge multiscale, multimodal dynamic tomographic microscopy to a heterogeneous international scientific community. To maintain and strengthen our role in this field – fully leveraging on the upcoming diffraction limited SLS2.0 machine [1] – our team is driving a major beamline upgrade project (TOMCAT 2.0) featuring a...
The newly built beamline ID03 specializes in hard x-ray microscopy. The main technique offered is dark field x-ray microscopy (DFXM), as pioneered on the prototype instrument on ID06-HXM.
DFXM is a combination of x-ray topography and full field microscopy, where an x-ray objective lens is placed in the Bragg diffracted beam between the sample and a high resolution detector. The magnified...
Given its relevance to biological systems and chemical synthesis, the radiolysis of water has been studied extensively in the past. Unlike previous studies, however, in this work, we study the ultrafast response of liquid water at elevated pressures between 50 and 225 bar. Surprisingly, when subject to intense X-ray radiation at 10 keV, the water molecules are observed to form a new long-range...
Hard X-ray nanoprobes offer access to a crucial experimental parameter space, with spatial resolutions and fields of view bridging between electron microscopies and larger scale studies. Through the use of different imaging modalities they provide an exciting opportunity to correlate chemical and structural information at the nanoscale. The combination of the penetrating power of hard X-rays...
The state of the art in X-ray microscopy is based on ptychography, which obtains high resolution approaching 5 nm by recording diffraction from the sample using a focused beam at photon energies of about 5 to 20 keV [1]. Robust algorithms are used to recover the diffraction phases and obtain an image of the complex-valued transmission of the sample. Achieving the high resolution requires...
The combination of X-ray spectral and phase contrast imaging offers complementary advantages for comprehensive imaging and analysis of complex samples. Such combined approach (XSPI) enables simultaneous visualization of structural features and elemental composition, facilitating quantitative multi-modal characterization of materials with diverse compositions and properties [1]. This...
