Laloum D, Printemps T, Lorut F, Bleuet P
Université Grenoble Alpes, F-38000 Grenoble, France.
STMicroelectronics, 850 rue Jean Monnet, 38926 Crolles, France.
Rev Sci Instrum. 2015 Jan;86(1):013703. doi: 10.1063/1.4905117.
X-ray tomography is widely used in materials science. However, X-ray scanners are often based on polychromatic radiation that creates artifacts such as dark streaks. We show this artifact is not always due to beam hardening. It may appear when scanning samples with high-Z elements inside a low-Z matrix because of the high-Z element absorption edge: X-rays whose energy is above this edge are strongly absorbed, violating the exponential decay assumption for reconstruction algorithms and generating dark streaks. A method is proposed to limit the absorption edge effect and is applied on a microelectronic case to suppress dark streaks between interconnections.
