Evaluation of an X-ray-excited optical microscope for chemical imaging of metal and other surfaces.

The application of a modular system for the nondestructive chemical imaging of metal and other surfaces is described using heritage metals as an example. The custom-built X-ray-excited optical luminescence (XEOL) microscope, XEOM 1, images the chemical state and short-range atomic order of the top 200 nm of both amorphous and crystalline surfaces. A broad X-ray beam is used to illuminate large areas (up to 4 mm(2)) of the sample, and the resulting XEOL emission is collected simultaneously for each pixel by a charge-coupled device sensor to form an image. The input X-ray energy is incremented across a range typical for the X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) and an image collected for each increment. The use of large-footprint beams combined with parallel detection allows the power density to be kept low and facilitates complete nondestructive XANES mapping on a reasonable time scale. In this study the microscope was evaluated by imaging copper surfaces with well-defined patterns of different corrosion products (cuprite Cu2O and nantokite CuCl). The images obtained show chemical contrast, and filtering the XEOL light allowed different corrosion products to be imaged separately. Absorption spectra extracted from software-selected regions of interest exhibit characteristic XANES fingerprints for the compounds present. Moreover, when the X-ray absorption edge positions were extracted from each spectrum, an oxidation state map of the sample could be compiled. The results show that this method allows one to obtain nondestructive and noninvasive information at the micrometer scale while using full-field imaging.