This lecture introduces synchrotron radiation and the most recent instrumentation exploiting the unrivalled brilliance of hard X-rays from synchrotron sources that now outperform laboratory X-ray sources by more than ten orders of magnitude.
With the start of the first hard X-ray 4th generation synchrotron source at the European Synchrotron (ESRF), flux- and brilliance-hungry methods, particularly those exploiting nanobeams and coherence, are gaining rapid momentum across the materials science community. Spatially resolving X-ray methods have advanced accordingly: tomographic imaging has gained in both resolution and throughput, while traditional techniques such as diffraction and spectroscopy are merging with imaging itself, studying increasingly complex samples. This brings new communities to these tools, from materials science and device physics - with time resolution pushed in the sub-nanosecond regime - to medicine and neuroscience, including the imaging of brain tissue at previously inaccessible resolution and speed. Combined with the growing use of AI and machine learning for reconstruction and data handling, this is opening new, faster routes from measurement to result.
I will present recent examples spanning materials science, device physics, and biomedicine, illustrating how these converging capabilities are reshaping what synchrotron X-ray imaging can offer to fields well beyond its traditional user base.