Doherty, A.; Fourmaux, S.; Astolfo, A.; Ziesche, R.; Wood, J.; Finlay, O.; Stolpe, W.; Batey, D.; Manke, I.; Légaré, F.; Boone, M.; Symes, D.; Najmudin, Z.; Endrizzi, M.; Olivo, A.; Cipiccia, S.: Femtosecond multimodal imaging with a laser-driven X-ray source. Communications Physics 6 (2023), p. 288/1-8
10.1038/s42005-023-01412-9
Open Access Version
Abstract:
Laser-plasma accelerators are compact linear accelerators based on the interaction of high-power lasers with plasma to form accelerating structures up to 1000 times smaller than standard radiofrequency cavities, and they come with an embedded X-ray source, namely betatron source, with unique properties: small source size and femtosecond pulse duration. A still unexplored possibility to exploit the betatron source comes from combining it with imaging methods able to encode multiple information like transmission and phase into a single-shot acquisition approach. In this work, we combine edge illumination-beam tracking (EI-BT) with a betatron X-ray source and present the demonstration of multimodal imaging (transmission, refraction, and scattering) with a compact light source down to the femtosecond timescale. The advantage of EI-BT is that it allows multimodal X-ray imaging technique, granting access to transmission, refraction and scattering signals from standard low-coherence laboratory X-ray sources in a single shot.