PETRA III X-ray microscope reveals to record resolution
PETRA III is now the world’s most advanced X-ray microscope, with a record-breaking resolution of 10 nanometres. The light source – located at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron [DESY] – can see down to structures ten thousand times thinner than a human hair.
The apparatus – which is already available to users – has many possible applications, including such uses as: imaging the structure of microchips, investigating carbon nanotubes and studying the chemistry of catalyst nanoparticles.
This scanning X-ray microscope uses ptychography, a technique which combines the many diffraction patterns formed when a fine X-ray beam scans a probe. Christian Schroer, PETRA III team leader at the University of Dresden, explains: “This way, ptychography can overcome the limitations of conventional microscopy, regarding the spatial resolution.”
The extreme brightness of PETRA III allows for highly detailed diffraction patterns, offering a special resolution twice that of conventional microscopy.
Schroer’s team demonstrated PETRA III’s capabilities by imaging a tantalum Siemens star: a radial black and white pattern used for testing optical quality. Their results were published in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters1.
PETRA III was developed by a team at the University of Dresden, and researchers from DESY’s experiment station P06. The project was funded in part by the German Federal Ministry of Research.
The researchers believe that higher resolutions of up to one nanometre may be achievable in the future, as the microscope’s resolution is – in principle – limited merely by the X-ray density on the sample.
- “Hard x-ray scanning microscopy with coherent radiation: Beyond the resolution of conventional x-ray microscopes“, A. Schropp et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 100, 253112 (2012), DOI: 10.1063/1.4729942 [↩]
