Microtomography is one of our latest interests. Although it probes the structure of materials on a larger size scale than the surface work described above, it has great potential for visualizing the interior of materials.

In microtomography, we have spatial resolution - 2 micron (2 thousandths of a millimeter) and below. When the measurement is conducted with x-rays from CAMD, the images that we take tell us the elemental composition of the structures inside. The materials that can be studied range from biological, medical, and environmental, to a wide range of advanced-technology materials.

Examples of these studies are given in these pages from our CAMD website.

Typical samples are roughly cylindrical with a diameter from 1 mm to 1 cm. We anticipate the eventual inclusion of a robot arm to make it easy to automate the study of many samples.

This instrument is NOW OPERATING IN LOUISIANA (thanks to our Board of Regents HEY: Real Cool Decision Folks! ) and, a consortium of LSU faculty are working with other universities, the LSU medical school, and local industries to exploit this advanced materials characterization technique at CAMD.

The Louisiana State Board of Regents initiated this work with an enhancement grant and now NSF has funded Clint Willson, Richard Kurtz and Kyungmin Ham with an Instrumentation for Materials Research (IMR) grant. This will will fund a monochromator for a wiggler beamline and give us access to much harder x-rays and expand the potential studies to a much bigger variety of materials.