I13L is one of Diamond’s long beamlines, dedicated to imaging and coherence related experiments. It has been designed to support a broad range of scientific users from biomedicine, materials science, geophysics, astrophysics, archaeology and engineering applications.

It is housed in a building 250 metres away from the main ring building, and similar to other beamlines at Diamond, it exploits Diamond’s brilliant X-rays and utilises them in two ways - an X-ray Imaging (I13LI) and a Coherence (I13LC) branch lines.

These branch lines provide different tools, which can which can run simultaneously and independently from each other, for non-destructive examination of internal features ranging from the micro (a few thousandths of a millimetre) to the nano (a few millionths of a millimetre) length scale.

The Diamond Manchester Imaging branch 

This branch line performs In-line phase contrast imaging and tomography over a large field of view in the 6-30keV energy range. The spatial resolution for this technique is in the micron range. In addition it will be possible to switch the instrument to full-field microscopy with 50nm spatial resolution.

In-line phase contrast imaging is available for users, supplemented at a later date with high-resolution microscopy.

The Diamond Manchester X-ray Imaging branch line is funded via a collaboration between Diamond Light Source and The University of Manchester. Find out more about the collaboration.

The Coherence branch

Resolution beyond the limitations given by the detector and X-ray optics can be achieved with methods working in reciprocal space. For crystalline samples Coherent X-Ray Diffraction allows not only reconstructing the shape of nano-crystals but also provides 3D information about parameters such as the internal stress.

Other Coherent Diffraction Imaging techniques are currently progressing that can be applied to cell structure imaging and other structures on the nano-lengthscale.