Ptychographic Imaging of Nano-Materials at the Advanced Light Source with the Nanosurveyor Instrument

We present a new ptychographic x-ray microscope dedicated to soft x-ray tomography and spectromicroscopy of nano-materials at the Advanced Light Source. The microscope utilizes an ultra-stable, high performance scanning mechanism with laser interferometer feedback for sample positioning and a fast frame rate charge-coupled device detector for soft x-ray diffraction measurements. The microscope can achieve point scan rates of 120 Hz with 1 nm RMS positioning accuracy. A high performance data pipeline has been developed which enables real time ptychographic reconstructions and user-friendly operation. This instrument, called The Nanosurveyor, can achieve a spatial resolution at least 10 times finer than the x-ray spot size in both two and three dimensions with sensitivity to electronicand magnetic states of nano-materials. In this paper we demonstrate the tomographic and spectromicroscopic capability of the Nanosurveyor instrument. At high brightness x-ray sources this instrument will enable spectromicroscopy and tomography of materials with diffraction limited spatial resolution. (paper)