Fabrication of Ultra-Thick Masks for X-ray Phase Contrast Imaging at Higher Energy

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel fabrication method for ultra-thick gold masks enabling high-energy X-ray phase contrast imaging, enhancing industrial non-destructive testing capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a new fabrication process combining optimized deep reactive ion etching and bismuth-mediated gold filling to produce thick masks suitable for high-energy XPCI.

Findings

Masks show good agreement with simulations at various energy thresholds.

Demonstrated higher phase sensitivity for highly absorbing objects.

Potential for industrial non-destructive testing applications.

Abstract

X-ray phase contrast imaging (XPCI) provides higher sensitivity to contrast between low absorbing objects that can be invisible to conventional attenuation-based X-ray imaging. XPCI's main application has been so far focused on medical areas at relatively low energies (< 100 keV). The translation to higher energy for industrial applications, where energies above 150 keV are often needed, is hindered by the lack of masks/gratings with sufficiently thick gold septa. Fabricating such structures with apertures of tens of micrometers becomes difficult at depths greater than a few hundreds of micrometers due to aspect ratio dependent effects such as anisotropic etching, and preferential gold (Au) deposition at the top of the apertures. In this work, these difficulties are overcome by Deep Reactive Ion Etching optimized by a stepped parameters approach and bismuth-mediated superconformal filling of Au, ultimately resulting in 500 micrometers deep silicon masks filled with Au at bulk density. The obtained masks, tested in an Edge Illumination XPCI system with a conventional source and a photon-counting detector, show good agreement with simulations at different energy thresholds. They also demonstrate a higher phase sensitivity for highly absorbing objects when compared to lower aspect ratio masks, proving their potential for industrial non-destructive testing.