CAMERA/ALS/STROBE Collaboration yields novel image data workflow pipeline.
What began nearly a decade ago as a Berkeley Lab Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) proposal is now a reality, and it is already changing the way scientists run experiments at the Advanced Light Source (ALS)—and, eventually, other light sources across the Department of Energy (DOE) complex—by enabling real-time streaming of ptychographic image data in a production environment.
In scientific experiments, ptychographic imaging combines scanning microscopy with diffraction measurements to characterize the structure and properties of matter and materials. While the method has been around for some 50 years, broad utilization has been hampered by the fact that the experimental process was slow and the computational processing of the data to produce a reconstructed image was expensive. But in recent years advances in detectors and x-ray microscopes at light sources such as the ALS have made it possible to measure a ptychographic dataset in seconds.
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Picture: The modular, scalable Nanosurveyor II system—now up and running at the ALS—employs a two-sided infrastructure that integrates the ptychographic image data acquisition, preprocessing, transmission and visualization processes.