Hosted by: Fang Lu

Owing to advances in multilayer Laue lens (MLL) fabrication and the development of a high-stiffness and high-precision instrument, MLL-based microscope has matured for real scientific applications and has become available for user operation at the Hard X-ray Nanoprobe beamline (HXN) of National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) with 15-nm spatial resolution. In addition to high resolution, a suite of techniques that employs various contrast mechanisms to simultaneously image elemental, structural and chemical variations on the nanoscale has been developed, enabling imaging capabilities that are not previously available. In this presentation, I'll focus on the development of multimodality imaging capability at the HXN. I'll show that by collecting fluorescence and far-field diffraction data together, absorption-, phase- and fluorescence-contrast images can be taken simultaneously, yielding additional information that any one of them alone cannot provide. Software packages have been developed to streamline the analysis in 2D and 3D cases. I'll present a few case studies to demonstrate how multimodality imaging can help understand the science. I'll also show the development of Bragg Ptychography technique, which allows the reconstruction of the strain field in crystalline samples with very high spatial resolution. The combination of high spatial resolution and multimodality imaging with hard x-rays creates a unique microscopy tool for material studies on the nanoscale and opens up a lot of exciting research opportunities in many areas of science.