Multimodal x-ray microscopy

Morphological analyses of biological systems are important at all length scales.

For a complete description of biological function, we need tools to study mechanisms and structures ranging from the anatomy of entire organs and organisms, down to the atomic length scale of molecules and proteins.

A thorough description and modelling of the three-dimensional structure of a system, is key to many scientific questions.

This is particularly true when studying e.g. blood vessel structure, nerve morphology, or other disciplines where a morphological network extends in all three spatial directions.Unfortunately, the standard method for the study of microscopic structure of tissue – histology – does only provide two-dimensional information per se.

Electron microscopy and microscopy with visible light can provide high resolution images of thin sections of a sample but can only in special cases give true volumetric information.The aim of this proposal is to design and construct a prototype x-ray microscope for three-dimensional histology.Imaging of soft tissue with conventional x-ray methods is very challenging due to poor contrast.

In conventional x-ray imaging, contrast comes from the different x-ray attenuation by different materials.

To overcome these challenges of poor image contrast, I propose the implementation of a novel inverse-geometry single-grating interferometer in combination with state-of-the-art x-ray source and detector.