Abstract
An x-ray phase tomographic microscope has been developed by optimizing the optical system for 9-keV synchrotron x rays at BL37XU, SPring-8, Japan. The system consists of a full-field x-ray imaging microscope and a Talbot interferometer. In contrast with our previous system, a Fresnel zone plate for the microscope objective and transmission gratings of the interferometer was designed to improve the refraction sensitivity, with a larger field of view and a higher spatial resolution, utilizing a 28-m space available at BL37XU. An x-ray phase tomographic microscope with a field of view of 375 µm and a spatial resolution of 560 nm was thus constructed, even with a considerably low x-ray dosage. By applying this tomographic microscope to auditory bone specimens of young mice, it was shown that soft tissues in addition to bone tissue could be observed simultaneously without serious radiation damage.
Highlights
Hard x-ray microscopy is a non-destructive approach to visualizing internal structures with submicrometer-scale spatial resolution and is widely used for materials science, life sciences, and biomedical research.1,2 While conventional absorption-contrast x-ray imaging has difficulty in imaging slight density differences in the microstructures of soft materials, phase contrast techniques provide considerable sensitivity because the interaction cross section of an x-ray phase shift for low-Z elements is about three orders of magnitude greater than that of x-ray absorption.3Zernike’s phase-contrast technique, which is widely used for optical microscopy, is available in the x-ray region.4–7 A phase plate for modulating the phase of unscattered x rays by π/2 or 3π/2 is set at the back focal plane of a microscope objective
The system consists of a full-field x-ray imaging microscope and a Talbot interferometer
In the newly developed system, the detector pixel size was set to 13.6 μm, but the magnification ratio was 74, and the expected spatial resolution is nearly determined by the outermost zone width of the adopted Fresnel zone plate (FZP)
Summary
Hard x-ray microscopy is a non-destructive approach to visualizing internal structures with submicrometer-scale spatial resolution and is widely used for materials science, life sciences, and biomedical research. While conventional absorption-contrast x-ray imaging has difficulty in imaging slight density differences in the microstructures of soft materials, phase contrast techniques provide considerable sensitivity because the interaction cross section of an x-ray phase shift for low-Z elements is about three orders of magnitude greater than that of x-ray absorption.. A phase plate for modulating the phase of unscattered x rays by π/2 or 3π/2 is set at the back focal plane of a microscope objective This technique is not available for quantitative measurement of strongphase objects; the image contrast suffers from artifacts of halo and shade-off because of the finite size of the phase plate. Quantitative phase measurements using x-ray microscopy have been attempted by combinations of an imaging microscope and a two-beam interferometer.. Quantitative phase measurements using x-ray microscopy have been attempted by combinations of an imaging microscope and a two-beam interferometer.8–10 These approaches have the potential of being considerably sensitive to phase shift, they have not enjoyed widespread practical use since their optical setup is complicated and high stability must be ensured throughout the operation. By installing a Talbot interferometer on the image plane of an x-ray microscope optics, a magnified (high-resolution) differential phase image can be measured.. The spatial resolution and the quantitativity of the x-ray refractive index in the resultant phase tomograms are evaluated
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