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Cloud-to-ground lightning can cause high-temperature and high-pressure deformation features in rock at the strike point, forming fulgurite. Although cloud-to-ground lightning is a frequent phenomenon, rock fulgurites are rarely reported. Here, we present field, optical microscope, X-ray fluorescence, scanning and transmission electron microscope, in situ synchrotron projection X-ray microscopy and X-ray diffraction, and Raman data to investigate the formation and preservation of a recently formed rock fulgurite from Kinmen Island, Taiwan. In the field, the fulgurite is asymmetrically distributed on the surface over an ~ 12 m area. In detail, the fulgurite contains an opaque glassy layer comprised of quartz and feldspar clasts, voids, iron-rich spheres, and barite aggregates that overlies fractured quartz grains and feldspar grains with planar features. Secondary minerals found locally adhering to the glassy layer as greenish patches are mainly jarosite group minerals, which commonly form as a secondary hydrothermal alteration product. We interpret the jarosite to have formed during the solidification of melt in the presence of raindrops, suggesting the rapid alteration of glass and short preservation potential of rock fulgurite. Finally, we estimate the production ratio of fulgurite by calculating the energy required for fulgurite formation and that released to the ground by the lightning event. A calculated energy ratio of 0.026% is within the range of 10 to 10 of the lightning total energy delivered to the strike point. We suggest that the scarcity of rock fulgurite in the geological record may be due to both the low production possibility and rapid alteration., The research was supported by the Taiwan ROC (Republic of China) Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST 110–2116-M-008–002-MY2) and Earthquake-Disaster & Risk Evaluation and Management Center (E-DREaM) from the Ministry of Education (MOE) to Li-Wei Kuo. Dennis Brown acknowledges funding (PGC2018-094227-B-I00) from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities, as well as a Chaired Professor stipend from the Department of Earth Sciences at National Central University. Jialiang Si acknowledges funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41872211).

An alternate multilayer plane grating has been designed for the soft X-ray tomography beamline. At this beamline, a grating with 600 line/mm and Au coating has already been set up to serve the energy range from 260 eV to 1200 eV. To fit the original optical design, a varied-line-spacing plane grating optimized at 2473 eV will be used in this beamline. The groove depth is 2.5 nm and its duty cycle is 0.5. The B4C/Mo alternate layers with period 30 are selected to enhance diffraction efficiency in the energy range 1100 eV -- 2600 eV. The varied-line-spacing plane grating paired with a matched multilayer plane mirror constitutes a monochromator to provide energetic photons. Based on the designed multilayer conditions, the calculated diffraction efficiency of alternate multilayer varied-line-spacing plane grating is about 0.24 at 2473 eV; the calculated photon flux is about 2.3 × 1011 photons/s. The resolving power is about 1670; the openings of the entrance and exit slits are 25 and 50 μm respectively.

To achieve an ultrahigh-resolution with soft x-ray beamlines at the Taiwan Photon Source (TPS), the slope error of a highly precise grating must be at the level of 0.1 μrad (RMS) under thermal loading with various curvatures. Some optics generally operate under a high power density from an undulator magnet on a beamline. The thermal load introduces a thermal bump in the optics profile and degrades the beamline performance, such as the energy resolution and beam size. Hence, active X-ray mirrors are emerging as primary solutions to meet the performance requirements of TPS. First, active X-ray optics were assembled in the laboratory and bent to the desired surface using an in-house long-trace profiler (LTP). When the optics were installed in the beamlines, LTP in situ (ISLTP) was used to fine-tune the mirrors under various operating conditions. This paper introduces the design and construction of ISLTP with a precision of 0.1 μrad (RMS) developed to measure the mirror profile in soft x-ray beamlines. The ISLTP can provide feedback perturbations owing to localised heat loading from the X-ray beam and thermal changes in the ambient environment, and its performance and in situ measurements are presented.

Projection X-ray microscopy (PXM) and transmission X-ray microscopy (TXM) have been established at beamline 31 at the Taiwan Photon Source (TPS). The TPS 31A beamline is sourced by a wiggler with multiple beam modes: white beam, high-flux mono-beam, and high-resolution mono-beam modes. The PXM is based on a collimated beam, and the TXM is full-field microscopy based on a zoneplate. The PXM system and TXM share the same detector platform, which is equipped with different kinds of detector systems for PXM and TXM. The PXM was designed for high-speed 3D tomography with an automatic tray system for loading and unloading samples, including a robotic arm and pre-alignment system. Both the PXM and TXM systems were designed for use in situ, which requires longer working distance for the sample’s environmental cell.

An attenuator is generally used to decrease the power of an X-ray beam and prevent damage to detector sensors and other optical components. Therefore, attenuators are designed using foil or gas to absorb light source power. In this project, a large aperture and a water-cooling attenuator system are construed for the TPS 31A Projection X-ray Microscope and Transmission X-ray Microscope beamline. The source size of the wiggler is 300 µm × 7 µm on TPS 31A. The X-ray beam size at the sample position is 50 mm × 20 mm, located 49.5 m from the source. The light emission power is 1000 W in white-beam operation mode. The attenuator is needed to absorb energy for the light source and it has 12 foil carriers. The absorption foil size is 56 mm × 46 mm for the beam size across different beamline operation modes, and the cooling capacity is greater than 1000 W. This study applies a magnetic coupling-type attenuator system with foil carrier cooling carried out by the side chamber walls without the feedthrough having water enter the chamber to solve the thermal dissipation issue.

This study develops and successfully demonstrates visualization methods for the characterization of europium (Eu)-doped BaAl

X-ray ptychography, a technique based on scanning and processing of coherent diffraction patterns, is a non-destructive imaging technique with a high spatial resolution far beyond the focused beam size. Earlier demonstrations of hard X-ray ptychography at Taiwan Photon Source (TPS) using an in-house program successfully recorded the ptychographic diffraction patterns from a gold-made Siemens star as a test sample and retrieved the finest inner features of 25 nm. Ptychography was performed at two beamlines with different focusing optics: a pair of Kirkpatrick–Baez mirrors and a pair of nested Montel mirrors, for which the beam sizes on the focal planes were 3 µm and 200 nm and the photon energies were from 5.1 keV to 9 keV. The retrieved spatial resolutions are 20 nm to 11 nm determined by the 10–90% line-cut method and half-bit threshold of Fourier shell correlation. This article describes the experimental conditions and compensation methods, including position correction, mixture state-of-probe, and probe extension methods, of the aforementioned experiments. The discussions will highlight the criteria of ptychographic experiments at TPS as well as the opportunity to characterize beamlines by measuring factors such as the drift or instability of beams or stages and the coherence of beams. Besides, probe functions, the full complex fields illuminated on samples, can be recovered simultaneously using ptychography. Theoretically, the wavefield at any arbitrary position can be estimated from one recovered probe function undergoing wave-propagating. The verification of probe-propagating has been carried out by comparing the probe functions obtained by ptychography and undergoing wave-propagating located at 0, 500 and 1000 µm relative to the focal plane.

This study is trying to design the thermal load effect on the soft x-ray beamline first mirror from ID (Insertion Device). The beamline first mirror is HFM (Horizontal Focus Mirror), the HFM need to absorb the thermal energy, soft X-ray the footprint size om HFM is 120*5.2 mm, the thermal power is about 270 W. The HFM cooling by the water pipe mounted on the thermal fin, mirror and thermal fin contact by Gallium–Indium alloy. The HFM thermal fin's Gallium–Indium alloy seal by nickel tube avoids leaking in the vacuum chamber. The HFM thermal fin design can cooling mirror backside and part of frontside, and the HFM thermal bump need small than 10u rad.

The small radius x-ray mirror in the interferometer stitching measurement is needed high angle resolution rotation stage to get reliable angle information. The rotation stage rotary range requirement is not wide, because of the X-ray mirror radius generally large than 200M, and the mirror length small than 1.2M. The angle resolution is needed high resolution, therefore, in interferometer stitching measurement, the interferogram is easily affected by the rotation angle difference. Thus, this study is to design a small angle traveling range (rotation angle maximum ± 1.5 degrees), high angle resolution (10 nrad.), and high loading capacity (loading maximum 75 Kg) rotation stage, the rotation mechanism is applied pivot bearing to get high-resolution rotation angle. The rotation stage design is finished, this article discusses system assembly and test.

To achieve an ultrahigh-resolution for soft X-ray beamlines, the slope error of a highly precise grating is required on the level of 0.1 μrad root-mean-square (RMS) under thermal loading. To realize the goal, a specially designed 25-actuator optical surface bender for the gratings and mirrors is developed and operated at Taiwan Photon Source (TPS) [1]. In this paper, the construction and operation of the in situ LTP measuring system is described[2]. This LTP consists of a switchable optical reflection system that let the LTP can switch to measure horizontal or vertical mounting mirrors/gratings in the beamline. The other is a low optical distortion and bakeable to 120 ˚C glass viewport which is used for the ultra-high vacuum[3,4] interface for the beamlines optics and LTP. The surface slope error being reduced down to 0.1 and 0.15 μrad (RMS) by the 25-actuator bender without/with the glass viewport as verified by the in situ LTP measurements in the beamline.

To achieve diffraction-limited focal spot size is a goal for next-generation synchrotrons. Mirrors are increasingly important for X-ray focusing optics following recent advances in mirror fabricati...

In this study, the carrier recombination mechanism of Cr-doped CsPbCl3 is investigated by temperature-dependent photoluminescence (PL) and time-resolved PL (TR-PL). Because of non-uniform doping with Cr, exciton localization is observed. This behavior can be demonstrated not only by temperature-dependent PL, where emission intensity rapidly increases at a temperature of less than 100 K, but also by temperature-dependent TR-PL, where temperature dependency of the radiative lifetime exhibits a linear dependence at temperatures ranging from 20 K to 100 K. Furthermore, PL decay lifetimes of Cr-doped CsPbCl3 at 20 K as a function of monitored emission energies are investigated. Results reveal that the excitons of Cr-doped CsPbCl3 exhibit a large localization depth ( E l o c ). The methods employed herein are anticipated to open new avenues with immense characterization ability for examining the emission properties of inorganic lead trihalide perovskites.

The goal of an in situ Long Trace Profiler (LTP) is to adjust the mirror to 0.1 μrad Root Mean Square (RMS) under thermal load. Here we introduce the measurement configuration for in situ LTP. To avoid lens aberration, the moving optical head keeps the optical paths constant, and the reference beam is used to the correct of the unavoidable air bearing errors. The window glass in this test has a rather high optical quality, with a flatness of 1/150 (RMS) over 120 × 20 mm. The optical quality of the window was specified to be ± 1 μrad slope distortion in an aperture length of 100 mm. The window glass deformation for the air pressure was calculated by the Finite Element Method (FEM) software (ANSYS). The window glass deformation results can be fitting by the Zernike polynomial, and then bring it into the sequential optical ray tracing software (ZEMAX), and evaluating the window glass effect on the LTP measurement results. By this approach, we found that this has a constant error. Thus, the window glass air pressure error can be effectively removed from the measurement result to reveal the real mirror profile. Using the in situ LTP measuring result and the data iteration process, the bendable mirror can control the optical surface locate profile and thereby minimize the thermal distort effect. The slope error will be reduced to 0.1 μrad at the thermal load.

To achieve an ultrahigh resolution for soft X-ray beamlines at Taiwan Photon Source (TPS), the slope error of a highly precise grating is required on level of 0.1 μrad (rms) under thermal loading with various curvatures. On the beamline, some optics are usually operating under high power density from undulator magnet, the thermal load will introduce a thermal bump on the optics profile and degrade the beamline performance, such as energy resolution and beam size. To realize the high resolution goal, a specially designed bender with 25 actuators for the grating is designed and a In situ long trace profiler (LTP) with precision of 0.1 μrad (rms) has been developed to measure the mirror profile in soft X-ray beamlines. This article introduces the design and construction of in situ LTP. It can provide a feedback guideance for the adjustment of actuators of bender mechanism to achieve the optium profile. A suitable adjustment procedure from the input of in-situ LTP , performance of bender and energy spectrums are presented. There are several benders as the active mirrors and active gratings in operation in TPS 41A resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) and TPS 45A angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) beamlines. In the meantime, three in situ LTPs have been developed to monitor the grating profile under the thermal load in the beamlines. They are providing a feedback to measure the surface figure and to find the optimal surface profile. They would increase our efficiency to reach the energy resolving power of 35,000 and 28,000 in the RIXS and ARPES beamlines, respectively.

The project of transmission x-ray microscope (TXM) with tender x-ray is undergoing as an extension project of the soft x-ray tomography (SXT) endstation at Taiwan Photon Source (TPS). This TXM is aimed for energy from 1.5 keV to 2.4 keV and with phase contrast with the x-ray energy of 2.4 keV. As the extension of current SXT project, the beamline will be equipped with a variable line spacing (VLS) grating with the multi-layer coating which will be optimized for 2.4 keV. This TXM will be zoneplate based with a phase ring and capillary condenser. In order to match the field of view and numerical aperture (NA) of zoneplate with the emittance of the source in vertical direction, some compromise should be made. To match the low emittance of vertical direction, the NA of zoneplate should be lower and vertical of the secondary source should be larger. This will lower spatial resolution and energy resolution. The targeting resolution of this TXM for phase contrast will be 50nm and FOV is 20 μm. For the detector, which is currently design with a scintillator with a CCD detector. For the future, the direct detector for small pixel and high signal to noise ratio can be obtained. The other components of TXM, such as stages, cryo system, which can be shared with current SXT system which works under the energy of the water window region. This endstation for tender X-ray will be commission in 2020. The detailed design and current progress will be discussed in this presentation.

The project “High loading precision rotation stage design for synchrotron radiation mirror measurement” aims to provide an ultra-high-precision heavy-duty rotation stage and X-ray mirror interference optical measurements. Since the shape of an X-ray lens is very different from that of the general visible optical lens, the measurement system is very different from the general visible light optical measurement system. This paper describes a high-load precision rotating platform for obtaining stitching interferometer measurements for a synchrotron radiation mirror. The synchrotron radiation mirror is usually rectangular, and the length is greater than the interferometer measurement size. Therefore, for the mirror measurement, the stitching method is usually used to obtain synchrotron radiation mirror measurements. The interference measurements are obtained at different positions. In order to obtain the measurements, the center line of the interferometer must be perpendicular to the tangent of the mirror surface, so that appropriate interference fringes can be obtained. As the mirror radius becomes smaller, the interferometer rotation angle sensitivity increases. Development of the stitching interferometer high-load precision rotating platform design target requires an angle rotation resolution

Time-resolved X-ray excited optical luminescence (TR-XEOL) was developed successfully for the 23A X-ray nanoprobe beamline located at the Taiwan Photon Source (TPS). The advantages of the TR-XEOL facility include (i) a nano-focused X-ray beam (

A synchrotron source offers the advantage of continuous and tunable x rays. Therefore, not only an X-ray nanoprobe can provide the desired spatial resolution to measure the elemental distribution of CaAlSiN3:Eu2+ via X-ray fluorescence mapping but X-ray absorption spectroscopy can also be used to unambiguously analyze the valence states of europium ions (Eu2+ or Eu3+) in different local areas. X-ray excited optical luminescence spectra exhibit only one red emission peak (∼650 nm) corresponding to the 4f65d1 to 4f7 transition of Eu2+, which reveals the fact that Eu2+ ions substitute perfectly for Ca2+ ions at the same site. Through detailed analysis, we demonstrated that the main contribution to the luminescence intensity of CASIN:Eu2+ comes from the Eu2+ activator in the product. We anticipate that X-ray nanoprobes will open new avenues with great characterization ability for studying the emission properties of CASIN:Eu2+.

X-ray excited optical luminescence (XEOL) using an x-ray nanobeam operating in the hybrid bunch mode provides not only a sufficiently high peak power density but also high-quality temporal domain measurements for studying the luminescence dynamics of photonic materials and devices. We used these features to investigate the peculiar emission behavior of the as-grown and rapid thermal annealing (RTA)-treated a-plane MgZnO epi-films, from which an anomalous emission was observed at ∼325 nm, along with a rapid increase in near-band edge (NBE) emission with increasing x-ray irradiation time. This peculiar emission behavior was also observed in the cathodoluminescence spectra obtained under electron beam excitation. Increases in the NBE emission intensity of the RTA-treated a-plane MgZnO epi-film were observed in terms of both photoluminescence and small anomalous emissions of XEOL. This can be explained by the effective transfer of Mg atoms from interstitial sites to suitable sites as a result of RTA treatment. Based on comparison with an a-plane ZnO epi-film without Mg, we conclude that the anomalous emission peak is caused by Mg-related energy states created by the high-dose x-ray or electron beam irradiation. Furthermore, the rapid increase in NBE emission and the reduction in the long decay lifetime can be attributed to charge transfer from the Mg clusters, which are thus responsible for the anomalous emissions.

The multifunctional hard X-ray nanoprobe at Taiwan Photon Source (TPS) exhibits the excellent ability to simultaneously characterize the X-ray absorption, X-ray excited optical luminescence (XEOL) as well as the dynamics of XEOL of materials. Combining the scanning electron microscope (SEM) into the TPS 23A end-station, we can easily and quickly measure the optical properties to map out the morphology of a ZnO microrod. A special phenomenon has been observed that the oscillations in the XEOL associated with the confinement of the optical photons in the single ZnO microrod shows dramatical increase while the X-ray excitation energy is set across the Zn K-edge. Besides having the nano-scale spatial resolution, the synchrotron source also gives a good temporal domain measurement to investigate the luminescence dynamic process. The decay lifetimes of different emission wavelengths and can be simultaneously obtained from the streak image. Besides, SEM can provide the cathodoluminescence (CL) to be a complementary method to analyze the emission properties of materials, we anticipate that the X-ray nanoprobe will open new avenues with great characterization ability for developing nano/microsized optoelectronic devices.

The synchrotron radiation optical system the thermal transfer issue is an important problem. The X-ray light is come from wiggler insert parts, the energy mirror absorption energy on the mirror surface is 40 W. The mirror length is 1000 mm, width is 87 mm, and thickness is 100 mm. This study is apply by X ray optical simulation software SHADOW, and Finite Element Method (FEM) ANSYS® software, to calculate mirror surface thermal deformation. The FEM software is calculate the mirror surface deformation from heat absorption, and the surface deformation can fitting by B-spline curve. The thermal deformation fitting results can feed back to X ray optical software SHADOW and evaluate mirror thermal deformation effect to optical system performance.

Polarization-dependent hard X-ray excited optical luminescence (XEOL) was used to study not only the optical properties but also the crystallographic orientations of a non-polar a-plane ZnO wafer. In addition to a positive-edge jump and extra oscillations in the near-band-edge (NBE) XEOL yield, we observed a blue shift of the NBE emission peak that follows the polarization-dependent X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) as the X-ray energy is tuned across the Zn K-edge. This NBE blue shift is caused by the larger X-ray absorption, generating higher free carriers to reduce the exciton-LO phonon coupling, which causes a decrease in the exciton activation energy. The extra oscillations in XANES and XEOL as the polarization is set parallel to the c-axis is attributed to simultaneous excitations of the Zn 4p - O 2pπ -bond along the c-axis and the bilayer σ-bond, whereas only the σ-bond is excited when the polarization is perpendicular to the c-axis. The polarization-dependent XEOL spectra can be used to determine the crystallographic orientations.

This on-the-fly scanning control system is for the x-ray nanoprobe endstation at Taiwan Photon Source(TPS) and built base-on the high speed Hardware (H/W), high throughput data stream and multi-channel control interfaces. The main idea is to tag each data with information of time and position, which generates by circuit and laser interferometer. The data is then processed by a computer to be analyzed and visualized. By using high speed FPGA with embedded processer to process the input and output data which includes the DAC, ADC, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and laser interferometer control interfaces. Three DAC control the X,Y and Z axes of the flexure stage, four ADCs and sensor interfaces gather the data and packet it into data packet. GbE send data back to computer to do image processing then reconstruct the scanning image. The numerous data not only for rebuild the image but also good for information analysis. Including the vibration, time slide analysis. Our demo system is built by an e-beam source, flexure stage and laser interferometer. The current maximum scanning speed is up to 5 lines/sec which is limited by the mechanical, the sample rate can be as high as 20M samples/sec which limited by laser interferometer, and the maximum data rate is close to 100M bytes/sec which is limited by the GbE. Interferometer information combine with position data in data packet, makes easy for data analysis and also for image stitching. The system is going to commission on beamline at March, 2017. The commission result for this system will be presented.

The diffraction-limited Montel mirrors, equipped at the X-ray Nanoprobe (XNP) at Taiwan Photon Source (TPS), provide a 40 nm focal spot and working distance 55 mm under the total beamline length of 69 m. The underneath holder supporting for the Montel mirrors is a 12 axes flexure based manipulators in which 10 out of the 12 axes are motorized. To monitor the position and stability of individual holder motion, a monitoring system consisted of three optical encoders and three- axes laser interferometers for angle movement is implemented. The gap width between the two mirrors and their orthogonality can be adjusted by a tilting sensor and a high magnification optical microscope. The focusing properties, phase and amplitude, after the Montel mirrors will be investigated by means of coherent Ptychography, as well as by zone plate imaging. An SEM in close cooperation with laser interferometers is equipped to precisely position the samples and conduct the on-the-fly scan. A high speed FPGA based circuit is developed to address signal from XRF, XAS, XEOL and XRD. Data is in tag with position and time information and been processed by computers to allow 5nm precision stage scanning free from mechanical feedback. The XNP at TPS is under commissioning since February 2017. The commissioning result, particularly the performance of the Montel mirrors will be reported in this presentation.

X-ray 3D tomographic techniques are powerful tools for investigating the morphology and internal structures of specimens. A common strategy for obtaining 3D tomography is to capture a series of 2D projections from different X-ray illumination angles of specimens mounted on a finely calibrated rotational stage. However, the reconstruction quality of 3D tomography relies on the precision and stability of the rotational stage, i.e. the accurate alignment of the 2D projections in the correct three-dimensional positions. This is a crucial problem for nano-tomographic techniques due to the non-negligible mechanical imperfection of the rotational stages at the nanometer level which significantly degrades the spatial resolution of reconstructed 3-D tomography. Even when using an X-ray micro-CT with a highly stabilized rotational stage, thermal effects caused by the CT system are not negligible and may cause sample drift. Here, we propose a markerless image auto-alignment algorithm based on an iterative method. This algorithm reduces the traditional projection matching method into two simplified matching problems and it is much faster and more reliable than traditional methods. This algorithm can greatly decrease hardware requirements for both nano-tomography and data processing and can be easily applied to other tomographic techniques, such as X-ray micro-CT and electron tomography.

Mast cells play an important role in allergic responses. During activation, these cells undergo degranulation, a process by which various kinds of mediators stored in the granules are released. Granule homeostasis in mast cells has mainly been studied by electron microscopy (EM), where the fine structures of subcellular organelles are partially destroyed during sample preparation. Migration and fusion of granules have not been studied in detail in three dimensions (3D) in unmodified samples. Here, we utilized soft X-ray tomography (SXT) coupled with fluorescence microscopy to study the detailed structures of organelles during mast cell activation. We observed granule fission, granule fusion to plasma membranes, and small vesicles budding from granules. We also detected lipid droplets, which became larger and more numerous as mast cells were activated. We observed dramatic morphological changes of mitochondria in activated mast cells and 3D-reconstruction revealed the highly folded cristae inner membrane, features of functionally active mitochondria. We also observed giant vesicles containing granules, mitochondria, and lipid droplets, which we designated as granule-containing vesicles (GCVs) and verified their presence by EM in samples prepared by cryo-substitution, albeit with a less clear morphology. Thus, our studies using SXT provide significant insights into mast cell activation at the organelle level.

To achieve an ultrahigh resolution of a beamline for soft X-rays at the Taiwan Photon Source (TPS), the profile of a highly precise grating is required at various curvatures. The slope error could be decreased to 0.1 µrad (rms) at a thermal load with a specially designed bender having 25 actuators. In the meantime, a long-trace profiler (LTP) was developed in situ to monitor the grating profile under a thermal load; it consists of a moving optical head, an air-bearing slide, an adjustable stand, and a glass viewport on the vacuum chamber. In the design of this system, a test chamber with an interior mirror was designed to simulate the chamber in the beamline. To prevent an error induced from a commercial viewport, a precision glass viewport (150CF, flatness 1/150 λ rms at 632.8 nm) was designed. The error induced from the slope error of the glass surface and the vacuum deformation was also simulated. The performance of the optical head of the LTP in situ (ISLTP) has been tested in the metrology laboratory. The sources of error of this LTP including the linearity and the glass viewport were corrected after the measurement. For the beamline measurement, an optical head was mounted outside the vacuum chamber; the measuring beam passed through the glass viewport to measure the grating profile in vacuum. The measurement of the LTP after correction of the above errors yielded a precision about 0.2 µrad (rms). In a preliminary test, an ISLTP was used to measure the grating profile at soft X-ray beamline TPS45A. The measured profile was for the bending mechanism to optimize the slope profile. From the measured energy spectrum, the slope error of the grating was estimated with software for optical simulation to be about 0.3 µrad (rms), consistent with our estimate of the ISLTP. In the future, it will be used to monitor the thermal bump under a large thermal load. In addition, an ISLTP was used to monitor the properties of optical elements-the twist and radius in the beamline during the installation phase.

The optical design of the varied-line-spacing plane-grating monochromator for transmission full-field imaging of frozen-hydrated biological samples at NSRRC is presented. This monochromator consists of a plane mirror and three interchangeable gratings with groove densities 600, 1200 and 2400 l/mm to cover the energy range 260 – 2600 eV. The groove parameters of the varied-line-spacing plane gratings are designed to minimize the effect of coma and spherical aberration to maintain the exit slit in focus for any value of incident angle. All parameters of optical components at the beamline are verified with a ray-tracing method. In the beamline design, the calculated results from the ray-tracing codes and the expected performances are discussed.

The hard X-ray nanoprobe facility at Taiwan Photon Source (TPS) provides versatile X-ray analysis techniques, with tens of nanometer resolution, including XRF, XAS, XEOL, projection microscope, CDI, etc. Resulting from the large numerical aperture obtained by utilizing Montel KB mirrors, the beamline with a moderate length 75 meters can conduct similar performance with those beamlines longer than 100 meters. The two silica-made Montel mirrors are 45 degree cut and placed in a V-shape to eliminate the gap loss and the deformation caused by gravity. The slope error of the KB mirror pair is less than 0.04 µrad accomplished by elastic emission machining (EEM) method. For the beamline, a horizontal DCM and two-stage focusing in horizontal direction is applied. For the endstation, a combination of SEM for quickly positioning the sample, a fly scanning system with laser interferometers, a precise temperature control system, and a load lock transfer system will be implemented. In this presentation, the design and...

Mast cells play an important role in allergic responses. During activation, these cells undergo degranulation, a process by which various kinds of mediators stored in the granules are released. Granule homeostasis in mast cells has mainly been studied by electron microscopy (EM), where the fine structures of subcellular organelles are partially destroyed during sample preparation. Migration and fusion of granules have not been studied in detail in three dimensions (3D) in unmodified samples. Here, we utilized soft X-ray tomography (SXT) coupled with fluorescence microscopy to study the detailed structures of organelles during mast cell activation. We observed granule fission, granule fusion to plasma membranes, and small vesicles budding from granules. We also detected lipid droplets, which became larger and more numerous as mast cells were activated. We observed dramatic morphological changes of mitochondria in activated mast cells and 3D-reconstruction revealed the highly folded cristae inner membrane, features of functionally active mitochondria. We also observed giant vesicles containing granules, mitochondria, and lipid droplets, which we designated as granule-containing vesicles (GCVs) and verified their presence by EM in samples prepared by cryo-substitution, albeit with a less clear morphology. Thus, our studies using SXT provide significant insights into mast cell activation at the organelle level.

The hard X-ray nanoprobe facility at Taiwan Photon Source (TPS) provides multimodal X-ray detections, including XRF, XAS, XEOL, projection microscope, CDI, etc. Resulting from the large numerical aperture obtained by utilizing nested Montel mirrors, the beamline with a moderate length 75 meters can conduct similar performance with those beamlines longer than 100 meters. The mirrors are symmetrically placed with a 45 degrees cut. The beamline optics is thus designed to take the advantage of the symmetry of mirrors such that a round focal spot is accomplished. The size and the divergence of the focus spot are simulated around 40 nm and 6.29 mrad, respectively. The whole facility including the beamline and the stations will be operated under vacuum to preserve the photon coherence as well as to prevent the system from unnecessary environmental interference. A SEM in close cooperation with laser interferometers is equipped to precisely locate the position of the sample. This endstation is scheduled to be commissioned in the fall of 2016.