[en] With the aim towards high-spatial-resolution phase measurement, a novel hard X-ray micro-interferometer using an imaging microscope has been proposed and constructed at Hyogo-BL of SPring-8. It is a wavefront-division-type interferometer consisting of a twin zone plate arranged in the same plane. We have succeeded in producing good interference fringes with a visibility of as high as 60% at the photon energy of 9 keV. The fringe scanning method was applied to retrieve phase-shift distribution of a sample. The phase-shift distribution of a 75-μm-thick kapton film and polystyrene microparticles could be imaged clearly with a spatial resolution of 160 nm and the obtained phase shift agreed well with the expected value. (author)

[en] We have developed a high-resolution x-ray microdiffraction system at the BL24XU of the SPring-8. This system uses a focused beam produced by using a zone plate combined with a narrow slit. The size of the focused beam is 0.32 μm vertically and 1.3 μm horizontally and the angular divergence in the horizontal direction is about 70 μrad at a photon energy of 15 keV. This low-divergence microbeam enables us to perform high-resolution x-ray microdiffraction experiments using a precise θ-2θ goniometer with sub-100-nm-resolved XYZ sample positioning stages. We demonstrate that the spatial non-uniformity of the strain and the period in InGaAsP multi-quantum-well structures, fabricated by selective metalorganic-vapor-phase epitaxy, can be measured with sufficient accuracy using this system

[en] Seven beamlines are operated for macromolecular crystallography (MX) at SPring-8. The three undulator beamlines are developed for cutting edge target and four bending-magnet beamlines are developed for high throughput MX. The undulator beamline, BL41XU that provides the most brilliant beam, is dedicated to obtain high quality data even from small-size and weakly-diffracting crystals. The minimum beam size at sample position is achieved to 10 μm diameter using a pin-hole collimator. Its photon flux at wavelength λ = 1.0 A is 2.8x10¹¹ photons/sec. This small beam coupled with irradiation point scanning method is quite useful to take diffraction dataset from small crystals by suppressing the radiation damage. These advanced technologies made a number of difficult protein structure analysis possible, (i.e. Sodium-potassium ATPase). The bending-magnet beamlines BL26B1/B2 and BL38B1 provide automatic data collection exploiting the high mobility of the beam. The beamline operation software 'BSS', sample auto-changer 'SPACE' and web-based data management software 'D-Cha' have made the automatic data collection possible. The 'Mail-in data collection system' that accepts distant users samples via courier service have made users possible to collect diffraction data without visiting SPring-8. The structural genomics research is promoted by these beamlines.