Session L05: The Changing Landscape of X-ray Facilities

Changing model of CHESS operation: The Changing Landscape of X-ray Facilities

For the last four decades, supported by federal agencies, synchrotron x-ray facilities have provided the user community free access to world-leading structural and spectroscopic x-ray characterization capabilities. These user facilities have enabled academic and industrial users to access routinely facilities and expertise at the national laboratories and created large communities of researchers who are now dependent on them. The combination of the need to upgrade existing facilities and to build entirely new capabilities, while still serving the existing users, has increased costs at a rate well beyond the growth in the agency budgets. At the same time, the emphasis on publications in high impact science journals and in the cost per paper has disadvantaged research in engineering topics and industrial researchers. In the future, additional partners will need to step up and provide financial support for synchrotron x-ray facilities. And, the synchrotron facilities will need to reconfigure to support a more diverse community of users. In this talk, I will explore how CHESS is adapting to meet these twin challenges.   

Liquid-metal-jet x-ray sources and high-resolution biomedical imaging

The power and brightness of electron-impact micro-focus x-ray tubes have long been limited by thermal damages to the anode. We pioneered a new anode concept, liquid-metal jets. This regenerative anode allows operation with electron-beam-power densities several orders of magnitude higher than with stationary or rotating anodes. Present liquid-metal-jet tubes typically rely on room-temperature liquid-metal alloys and operate with a 4-20 μm spot size in the 20-160 kV range with up to one order of magnitude higher brightness than state-of-the-art x-ray micro-focus tubes. The liquid-metal-jet sources are now commercially available by Excillum. We will describe the principles as well as recent developments of these high-brightness sources.

The high brightness enables a wide range of applications in diffraction, scattering, and imaging. In biomedical imaging we exploit the source properties for high spatial resolution and high contrast. Typically, we employ propagation-based phase contrast and combine with tomographic reconstructions for 3D imaging. Examples include studies of whole animals (mouse, zebrafish), organs (lungs, muscles), microvasculature (kidney, ear, tumors), and virtual histology (human coronary arteries). The source enables observation of cellular, and in some cases subcellular, detail within the context of the whole organ, animal, or specimen.   

The Lyncean Compact Light Source: The Cornerstone of a Local, Multi-discipline X-ray Facility

Synchrotron facilities around the globe are the supercomputers of X-ray science serving more than ten thousand researchers. The light emanating from these sources can be characterized as high flux, monochromatic, energy tunable and, in some cases, coherent.
There is an increasing need for small, locally owned and operated, multi-discipline, X-ray facilities that provide the flux and energy tunability that is required for many experiments, such as diffraction for weakly scattering samples, spectroscopy, or dynamic tomography.
The Lyncean Compact Light Source (CLS), the first commercially developed X-ray source specifically created to deliver a true home laboratory alternative to many experiments performed today at the large synchrotrons, is the cornerstone of such an X-ray facility. X-rays are produced in the CLS via inverse Compton scattering through the interaction of low energy electrons (25 to 45 MeV) in a miniature storage ring with a micrometer-wavelength, high powered laser pulse (laser-undulator) by Compton backscattering. Tunable, monochromatic, and high flux undulator synchrotron radiation is generated in the CLS "mini-synchrotron" as a result of the high repetition rate (~60MHz) of this interaction. Characteristics of the CLS X-ray beam are similar to those of a bending magnet synchrotron in terms of flux and coherence, and as such, similar synchrotron quality applications can be performed: imaging/tomography, diffraction, scattering, and spectroscopy.
In this presentation we will present the technology behind the Compact Light Source as well as examples of the measurements that have been made and that can be made in the future with the Lyncean Compact Light Source and our vision for distributed, small-scale, multi-discipline X-ray facilities around the globe.   

Innovations in Laboratory X-ray Technology Brings Synchrotron Capabilities to Your Lab.

X-ray techniques offer capabilities with unique intrinsic advantages, including determining crystallographic structure using XRD, chemical composition using XRF, atomic structure using EXAFS, oxidation state using XANES, and x-ray imaging (Radiography and CT). Additionally, those capabilities can be used to study real objects under real operating conditions. Those capabilities have motivated the construction of numerous synchrotron radiation facilities at the cost of many hundreds of million dollars worldwide. Sigray is developing innovations in laboratory x-ray technologies that will bring numerous synchrotron capabilities to individual labs. The innovations include high brightness x-ray sources, advanced x-ray optics, and innovative system designs. The Sigray FAAST™ source features an anode comprised of arrays of metal (e.g. Cu, W) microstructures as x-ray emitters embedded in a diamond substrate, which enables highly localized and large thermal gradients to passively and rapidly cool the metal microstructures as x-rays and heat are generated under the bombardment of electrons. The thermal advantages of the x-ray source will critically enable the use of many elements that were previously considered unfeasible as x-ray source materials, and therefore will enable access to new x-ray characteristic lines to optimize performance in monochromatic x-ray analysis. The source enables linear accumulation of x-rays along a set of microstructures, which further increases the substantial brightness gain. Sigray’s proprietary axially symmetric x-ray mirror lenses offer outstanding performance in terms of focusing efficiency, numerical aperture (NA), FWHM of point spread function, working distance, focus chromaticity, energy bandpass, energy transmission, source brightness preservation, and phase space acceptance. Sigray also developed several patented innovative systems for x-ray absorption spectroscopy, fluorescence analysis, diffraction, and imaging. I will present those innovative x-ray technologies and current status of their development.