‘Compact’ hard X-ray machine works!
TU/e researchers get ‘compact’ hard X-ray machine to work – a research story
What started as the desire to look better into paintings with so-called hard X-rays, with wavelengths smaller than a nanometer, now leads to an incredible achievement by a team of researchers led by Jom Luiten and Peter Mutsaers. With their compact ‘synchrotron’, which fits in a lab space instead of covering an entire building, they successfully generated hard X-rays in a very narrow wavelength range. This X-ray radiation can also be precisely tailored to the material you want to study. The fact that this is possible with a source of these dimensions is unique in the world. The journey to this milestone reads like an adventure book.
On a Friday afternoon in September, Jom Luiten, Professor of Coherence and Quantum Technology, receives a phone call from the lab saying, “Jom, you have to come to the lab now!”. The phone call came from his PhD students Ids van Elk and Coen Sweers, who were still working in Qubit’s basement. Colleague Peter Mutsaers had the misfortune of being on holiday.
Upon arrival at the lab, it quickly became clear what the reason was: the compact X-ray machine, which can make close-knit and adjustable hard X-rays, works! This is reason enough for great joy and a quick message on Monday to all members of the Smart*Light 2.0 research consortium.
The reason for this great joy? For that, we have to go back to the start of the research. The journey began, not entirely characteristic of our university, with a painting.
Art historian and materials scientist Joris Dik is affiliated with the Delft University of Technology and is well known for discovering overpainted preliminary studies by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, and Magritte.
With his work, world-famous paintings have been recovered, and he became known for the X-ray analysis of Van Gogh’s painting ‘Grassland’, under which a possible study of the ‘Potato Eaters’ has been recovered.
With his desire to be able to look into paintings with X-rays, he came into contact with Yom Luiten through the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). X-rays make it possible to look beneath the surface of paintings or other art-historical or archaeological objects.
This new X-ray source promises that you can study the chemistry and structure of paint layers at a much higher resolution. This offers, for example, the opportunity to make individual, hidden layers of paint in a painting visible.
Because it is a compact X-ray source, it can, in principle, also be used in a museum. This provides an enormous opportunity for research into museum heritage.
A pocket-sized synchrotron?
To look into the layers of paintings, you need a different X-ray source. That’s what Dik was looking for! However, equipment that can generate such precisely destemmed X-rays is not yet available anywhere in a hospital or museum.
In fact, at the moment, this is only possible with a synchrotron. And as the name suggests, those large round synchrotrons (such as the ESRF in Grenoble) have enormous dimensions. Moreover, they are expensive to build and, therefore, always fully booked for research. It is not suitable for scanning a new purchase in a museum and certainly not the entire collection.
While talking to Dik, Luiten came up with a number of good ideas for building a smaller device that can also generate tunable, close-band hard X-rays at a reasonably high intensity. And then with a setup the size of an optical lab table instead of a vast building.
A device of such dimensions will fit in an average-sized lab space and, in principle, even in a shipping container. So a building doesn’t have to be rebuilt to get it in. The device can even hang from the ceiling to monitor production processes with that size.
This linear X-ray source is practically pocket-sized in the world of large synchrotrons. Luiten: “And we even have ideas on making the instrument even more compact.”
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