A versatile indirect detector design for hard X-ray microimaging

Indirect X-ray detectors are of outstanding importance for high resolution imaging, especially at synchrotron light sources: while consisting mostly of components which are widely commercially available, they allow for a broad range of applications in terms of the X-ray energy employed, radiation dose to the detector, data acquisition rate and spatial resolving power. Frequently, an indirect detector consists of a thin-film single crystal scintillator and a high-resolution visible light microscope as well as a camera. In this article, a novel modular-based indirect design is introduced, which offers several advantages: it can be adapted for different cameras, i.e. different sensor sizes, and can be trimmed to work either with (quasi-)monochromatic illumination and the correspondingly lower absorbed dose or with intense white beam irradiation. In addition, it allows for a motorized quick exchange between different magnifications / spatial resolutions. Developed within the European project SCIN^TAX, it is now commercially available. The characteristics of the detector in its different configurations (i.e. for low dose or for high dose irradiation) as measured within the SCIN^TAX project will be outlined. Together with selected applications from materials research, non-destructive evaluation and life sciences they underline the potential of this design to make high resolution X-ray imaging widely available.