Applications and X-ray Technology

While medicine and dentistry remains the most common use of X-rays, they are also widely used in other applications from airport security to industrial inspection and quality control systems. The arrangement of atoms in molecules is routinely determined using X-ray crystallography. The most famous example along these lines is the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, as determined by Crick and Watson. They also received the Nobel Prize, along with numerous other investigators using X-ray radiation.

Another one of the Nobel Prizes we wish to highlight here is the 1979 prize for Cormack and Hounsfield for CAT scanning, or X-ray tomography. This discovery made it possible to use X-rays to create three dimensional representations of structures as complex as the human body.

Medical X-rays and CAT (computed axial tomography) scans are familiar methods that are employed routinely at doctor offices and hospitals.

X-ray shadowgraphs of a chest and the hip region of a human body (left). CAT scan sections of a human skull (right).

The idea of building high resolution X-ray microscope systems has occupied scientists since the discovery of X-rays themselves; however the lack of lenses for X-rays has been a major obstacle to turn it into reality. In 1948 Paul Kirkpatrick of Stanford University, and his graduate student Albert Baez developed the first X-ray microscope using reflective optics. By bouncing X-rays off curved mirrors at very large angle of incidence (i.e. grazing angle) they were able to bend and focus X-rays onto a small spot, creating the first microscopic images using X-ray energy.

In the past 30 years, the development of X-ray optical components that manipulate X-rays in much the same way as glass lenses manipulate light, has revolutionized the application of X-ray technology into entirely new areas of research. Lenses make it possible to build microscopes, to examine tiny objects. The wavelength is adjusted to match the penetrating power of the X-rays to the object to be examined, and thereby optimize the contrast. Big research facilities, synchrotron light sources, have been constructed to generate X-rays for research purposes with tunable wavelengths, and much higher intensity than common laboratory X-ray sources.

Xradia has been brought to life with the mission of commercializing and bringing high-resolution 3D X-ray imaging from the research lab to general use for scientists and industry.