Mapping misoriented fibers using X-ray dark field tomography

Abstract

X-ray grating interferometers produce three distinct signals; an absorption signal, a differential phase signal and a dark field signal. Until now a method for successfully creating dark field tomograms of nonisotropic samples has not been demonstrated. In this paper we test a method for creating such tomograms on a highly nonisotropic sample, i.e. a five layer “sandwich” of oriented carbon fibers. The fibers are parallel within the individual sandwich layers, but perpendicular to the fibers in the adjacent layers. We show that by choosing a rotation axis parallel to the grating stepping direction (i.e. a horizontal rotation axis in most setup configurations) it is possible to produce a darkfield tomogram where fibers parallel to the probed scattering direction appear to have no dark field signal. The method produces a tomogram in the form of a scalar field of dark field scattering values.