Application of refraction contrast tomography

It has been shown in earlier works that smallest beam deviations (μrad) caused by refraction can be used to reconstruct the macroscopic inner structure of samples by the means of tomography. Hence, structures of low contrast materials, i.e. materials with low values or differences of attenuation coefficients, could be imaged by tomographic reconstruction although the conventional attenuation contrast method failed. Such tomographic scans have mainly been performed in a bent crystal-type double crystal diffractometer (DCD) using a one-dimensional position sensitive detector (PSD). This setup provided only q-resolution in the PSD, while the spatial resolution was achieved by scanning the sample through a slit collimated beam. The first practical application of this method shall be introduced here and advantages compared to the conventional method will be discussed. The measurement of two samples, a test with a dummy sample and a measurement of a sample requested by a company, are the examples to be reported.