Physicists at the University of California San Diego have developed a new kind of X-ray microscope that can penetrate materials to see details at the scale of one billionth of a meter -- without using a lens.
The images generated from the nanoscale X-ray microscope are by a computer program. In a paper published recently in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the physicists explain that the algorithm is able to convert the diffraction patterns produced by the X-rays bouncing off the nanoscale structures into resolvable images.“The mathematics behind this is somewhat complicated,” says Oleg Shpyrko, an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego who headed the research team. “But what we did is to show that for the first time that we can image magnetic domains with nanometer precision. In other words, we can see magnetic structure at the nanoscale level without using any lenses.”Not only does this development eliminate the complexity of using a lens, it is also immediately applicable to nanoscience and nanotechnology.