June 2005 Archives

For many years, great efforts have been made around the world to develop soft and hard X-ray microscopes. Very recently, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, California, USA, have succeeded in fabricating an extremely high-performance objective lens, i.e., a micro zone plate, which projects a full-field image of the sample. The spatial resolution is 15 nm or even smaller for synchrotron soft X-rays (150~1800 eV). The key point is the improvement in electron beam lithography, since the spread due to electron scattering has previously been a big problem when patterning. The Berkeley team separately drew two different zone-plate patterns and then overlaid them very accurately. For more information, see the paper, "Soft X-ray microscopy at a spatial resolution better than 15 nm", W. Chao et al., Nature, 435, 1210-1213 (2005).

Australian Synchrotron and SPring-8 (Japan) have signed a new partnership agreement to share expertise and develop new technology. This agreement will allow scientists to move freely between both facilities and to work together to exchange ideas and develop new experimental technology, such as new detectors.