MRI: Acquisition of a state-of-the-art high-resolution X-ray computed tomography scanner

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This Major Research Instrumentation award supports acquisition of a state-of-the-art micro-computed tomography scanner for the University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility (UTCT), an NSF-supported shared multi-user facility that provides scanning services, research, training, software development, and expertise to the scientific community. Computed tomography (CT) is ideally suited to many geological applications, as it nondestructively creates 3D imagery of the interiors of rocks, fossils, meteorites and other materials. The new instrument will offer leading-edge capabilities, allowing investigators and students to acquire superior data at greater speed, and explore new types of imaging never before possible in the laboratory. These enhancements will benefit a wide range of research users; in 2018 alone, more than 75 peer-reviewed papers using UTCT data were published, in the geosciences, biosciences, engineering, and anthropology. The new instrument, a Zeiss Versa 620, will double both the scanning speed and achievable spatial resolution of the instrument it is replacing, while expanding its ability to image subvolumes within larger samples at high resolution. It includes the new capability to do laboratory-based diffraction contrast tomography (DCT) to obtain crystallographic orientation information within sample volumes, previously only possible at synchrotron beam lines. The new instrument will also seamlessly accept experimental cells enabling in situ analyses of samples at various geologic conditions of temperature, pressure, and fluid flow. It will also position UTCT to participate in and benefit from algorithmic developments in tomographic reconstruction, allowing the investigators to get more detailed and less noisy information from the raw X-ray attenuation data. These new capabilities reinforce the facility mission to serve both as a source of high-quality data for investigators without access to CT instrumentation, and as a repository of experience and expertise in all aspects of CT data acquisition and analysis, both through individual consultation and collaboration and by teaching short courses and distributing software.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.