A compact light source for high-throughput x-ray tomography applications

There is a large performance gap between X-ray tomography instruments with conventional laboratory X-ray sources and synchrotron radiation sources. An Inverse Compton Scattering (ICS) source can provide a narrow-band, high flux and tunable X-ray source that fits into a laboratory at a cost of a few percent of a large synchrotron facility. Here we present an ICS source design that is more than two orders of magnitude brighter than sources currently in operation, well-suited for high resolution, micro-CT imaging of millimeter-sized samples at micron resolution, with a flux density similar to some high-energy synchrotron beamlines.