nanoXCT™ S-60 (Synchrotron Tomographic Imaging X-Ray Microscope)

The nanoXCT S Series microscopes are Xradia's TXM nano-tomography systems, adapted for synchrotron operation. The unique properties of a synchrotron source provide a number of additional powerful capabilities to the already capable nanoXCT series microscopes:

High throughput: Synchrotrons provide many orders of magnitude higher brightness than laboratory x-ray sources, leading to dramatically shorter exposure time and higher throughput. Sub-second exposure times can be achieved with any synchrotron radiation source.
High resolution: The high brightness of the synchrotron radiation sources also makes it practical to use the relatively less efficient high diffraction order of the zone plate with increased resolution. By using 3rd order focus of the zone plate, a resolution of 20-30 nm can be achieved.
Spectro-microscopy: Synchrotron radiation source provides continuously tunable x-ray energy. The nanoXCT S-60 microscope is therefore able to utilize x-rays with a continuous energy range between 5 and 12 keV to perform spectroscopic imaging at extremely high-energy resolution. Microscopy and nano-tomography with elemental sensitivity can be performed with differential absorption contrast. The elements with absorption edges within this energy range include many that are important in material science, biology, medicine, environmental sciences, and semiconductor industries: elements between Cr and Br in the periodic table with K-edge and between Nd and Pb with L-edge.

The nanoXCT S-60 is an extremely useful tool to dynamically study real-time process.

With these additional capabilities, the nanoXCT S series microscopes offer a number of unique capabilities that are not available with any other imaging technology. It is a system with high 3D spatial resolution of 30 nm and high-energy resolution of 1000 or higher. It is an extremely valuable tool for non-destructive micro-imaging and micro-analysis.

The availability of nanoXCT S-60 addresses the need within the synchrotron community for efficiently implementing state of the art microscopy capabilities in a powerful, user-friendly, well-documented, fully-supported, fully-automated system that can be shared among researchers. It makes available the extraordinary performance achievable with Xradia's Fresnel zone plate lenses that currently achieve 60nm resolution and that promise to reach a 25nm resolution as developments progress. Further enhancements include dark field imaging and phase contrast imaging. The nanoXCT S-60 is equipped with the state of the art image processing and analysis capabilities, including proprietary image alignment algorithms required for aligning different tomographic projection images with high accuracy, special tomography reconstruction algorithms developed specifically for a tomographic data set over a limited angular range (typically collected for extended objects such as an IC chip) and 3D imaging visualization and analysis software.