Psi ‘neutron microscope’ at ill-d50 beamline-first results

Abstract

A high-resolution neutron imaging system referred to as ‘Neutron Microscope’ (NM) has been recently established as a piece of instrumental equipment at the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI), Switzerland. It is providing the wide user community of the Neutron Imaging and Applied Materials Group (NIAG) with the capability of spatial image resolution below 5 µm at effective pixel sizes of 1.3 µm. The NM has been designed as a portable, self-contained system that can be moved between beamlines at PSI with only moderate effort. In this contribution, we report on the first results and experience with the Neutron Microscope externally, at a beamline of another neutron source outside the Swiss Spallation Neutron Source (SINQ). In June 2018, NM has been transported to the Institute Laue-Langevin (ILL) and was successfully installed at the D50 beamline for four days. A gadolinium based Siemens star produced at PSI has been used for the assessment of the spatial resolution. The spatial resolution achieved using the Neutron Microscope at ILL-D50 equalled 4.5 µm. Above that, several high-resolution tomographies of various samples were acquired, of which an illustrative example is presented.