One mirror-like plate that both photographs and fingerprints matter with soft X-rays

To study matter at the atomic scale, scientists usually need two instruments: one to image it, one to read its chemistry. A team led by Zhong Yin at Tohoku University has folded both into a single optical element — a reflection zone plate, a precisely patterned plate that reflects, focuses, images and spreads soft X-rays by energy all at once. In their demonstration, published in Optics Express, the full dataset was collected in about 220 seconds, far faster than conventional approaches, and unlike older designs the plate needs no fragile supporting membrane for the X-rays to pass through. The team suggests the approach could serve chemical and elemental mapping and a technique called RIXS that probes how materials behave — and could one day pair with laboratory X-ray sources and free-electron lasers, shrinking room-sized experiments toward the benchtop.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation