Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to David, C.
We report on the implementation of X-ray grating interferometry at the imaging beamline ID19 of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF). We give a brief overview of the results obtained so far with this instrument and on ongoing developments.
Exposure of structures with rotational symmetry by means of electron beam lithography is not trivial, because the e-beam writers are usually designed to deal with the data defined in Cartesian coordinates. Fabrication of circular nanostructures like Fresnel zone plates (FZPs) for x-ray microscopy applications requires exposures with resolution well below 1 nm. Therefore, special attention has to be paid to the efficient exposure data preparation, which will guarantee required precision and allow keeping the exposure time low. In this article, we describe in detail an optimized strategy that was applied for exposure of FZPs by the Vistec EBPG5000Plus e-beam lithography tool. Direct programming of exposure files allowed us to use fully the capabilities of this e-beam writer to expose efficiently and reproducibly FZPs with desired characteristics in both positive and negative tone resists.
Synchrotron-based full-field tomographic microscopy established itself as a tool for noninvasive investigations. Many beamlines worldwide routinely achieve micrometer spatial resolution while the isotropic 100-nm barrier is reached and trespassed only by few instruments, mainly in the soft x-ray regime. We present an x-ray, full-field microscope with tomographic capabilities operating at 10 keV and with a 3D isotropic resolution of 144 nm recently installed at the TOMCAT beamline of the Swiss Light Source. Custom optical components, including a beam-shaping condenser and phase-shifting dot arrays, were used to obtain an ideal, aperture-matched sample illumination and very sensitive phase-contrast imaging. The instrument has been successfully used for the nondestructive, volumetric investigation of single, unstained cells.