Present and Future X-ray Tomographic Microscopy at TOMCAT

During its first four years of life, the TOMCAT beamline [1] at the Swiss Light Source has established itself as a state‐of‐the art hard x‐ray tomographic microscopy endstation for experiments on a large variety of samples, ranging from the fields of biology to materials science. It routinely performs absorption as well as phase‐contrast imaging with an isotropic voxel size ranging from 0.360 up to 14.8 microns. Phase contrast is obtained either with simple edge‐enhancement, a modified transport of intensity approach [2] or grating interferometry [3]. Typical acquisition times are on the order of a few minutes, depending on energy and resolution. A recently implemented automatic sample exchanger is now available for high‐throughput studies [4]. In addition to further developments in phase‐contrast imaging, current scientific activities at the beamline focus on pushing spatial and temporal resolution by a few orders of magnitude, aiming at nano‐ [5] and “real‐time” [6] tomography.