Real-time, High-throughput, Coherent X-ray Microscopy: from Large-Scale Installations to Tabletop Device

Recent advances in Coherent X-ray Microscopy opened new exciting avenues for 2D/3D imaging, allowing to visualize deformations in batteries and solar cells during charge migration, magnetic topologies, catalysts pollution, transistors fabrication defects, neuron activity.

These emerging applications are expected to offer significant growth opportunities to market players in the coming years, complementing the possibilities offered by optical and electron-based microscopy methods.

However, the expansion of this technology is currently hindered by its availability at facility-scale installations, where implementations are expensive and limit accessibility to a highly-specialized community.

In ULTRAIMAGE (851154), we tackled the challenge by scaling this technology to a tabletop device, while retaining flexibility and complementary facility-scale performances.

Specifically, we prototyped a coherent XUV microscope which offers the following advantages: (i) femtosecond time- and ngstrom-to-nanometer spatial resolution; (ii) exquisite material composition and height contrast, through amplitude and phase; (iii) self-diagnostic capabilities of aberrations and misalignments; (iv) quantitative, multimodal, non-destructive imaging.

HYPER aims towards the next step of R&I, increasing robustness, throughput, speed, and availability to the public, while retaining cost-effectiveness.

Key to this advancement is: (i) implementation of beamline-style, real-time, diagnostics of intensity, spectrum, wavefront of the illumination; (ii) use of code parallelization, deep-learning, and fast XUV detection technology.

Accessibility to a broad range of stakeholders and end users, and the translation to market of the consolidated technology, will be deployed through a strategic network of academe and industry partners.

HYPER will foster broad, unprecedented understanding of functionality at the nanoscale, vital to the design of next generation optoelectronics and biomedical devices.