EXPERIMENT CONTROL AND ANALYSIS FOR HIGH-RESOLUTION TOMOGRAPHY

X-ray Computed Tomography (XCT) is a powerful technique for imaging 3D structures at the micro- and nano-levels. Recent upgrades to tomography beamlines at the APS have enabled imaging at resolutions up to 20 nm at increased pixel counts and speeds. As detector resolution and speed increase, the amount of data that must be transferred and analyzed also increases. This coupled with growing experiment complexity drives the need for software to automate data acquisition and processing. We present an experiment control and data processing system for tomography beamlines that helps address this concern. The software, written in C++ using Qt, interfaces with EPICS for beamline control and provides live and offline data viewing, basic image manipulation features, and scan sequencing that coordinates EPICS-enabled apparatus. Post acquisition, the software triggers a workflow pipeline, written using ActiveMQ, that transfers data from the detector computer to an analysis computer, and launches a reconstruction process. Experiment metadata and provenance information is stored along with raw and analyzed data in a single HDF5 file.