Novel X-ray phase-difference microscopy based on Talbot effects

X-ray absorption microscopy is simple, but has low sensitivity in biological samples that are made of light elements. X-ray phase contrast imaging can provide contrast that is 3 orders of magnitude greater than X-ray absorption. However, phase contrast imaging has not been that widely used so far mainly because of the unusual requirements of the experimental setup. Dr. W. Yashiro (The University of Tokyo, Japan) and his colleagues have recently proposed a novel setup that is feasible. The research group simply added a transmission grating to the setup for conventional X-ray absorption microscopy with a Fresnel Zone Plate (FZP) objective lens. Because of the self-imaging phenomenon in Talbot effects, a phase difference image can be produced by the transmission grating placed at the downstream of the back focus of the FZP. The experiment was done at beamline BL20XU, SPring-8. For more information, see the paper, "Hard-X-Ray Phase-Difference Microscopy Using a Fresnel Zone Plate and a Transmission Grating", W. Yashiro et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 180801 (2009).